little man to talk to her like that!

"Do you then think," said Dorothy, "that the dead only seem to have gone
from us?" and her eyes looked like store-houses of holy questions.

"I know so little," he answered, "that I dare hardly say I _think_ any
thing. But if, as our Lord implies, there be no such thing as that which
the change appears to us--nothing like that we are thinking of when we
call it _death_--may it not be that, obstinate as is the appearance of
separation, there is, notwithstanding, none of it?--I don't care, mind:
His will _is_, and that is every thing. But there can be no harm, where
I do not know His will, in venturing a _may be_. I am sure He likes His
little ones to tell their fancies in the dimmits about the nursery fire.
Our souls yearning after light of any sort must be a pleasure to him to
watch.--But on the other hand, to resume the subject, it may be that, as
it is good for us to miss them in the body that we may the better find
them in the spirit, so it may be good for them also to miss our bodies
that they may find our spirits."

"But," suggested Ruth, "they had that kind of discipline while yet on
earth, in the death of those who went before them; and so another sort
might be better for them now. Might it not be more of a discipline for
them to see, in those left behind, how they themselves, from lack of
faith, went groping about in the dark, while crowds all about them knew
perfectly what they could not bring themselves to believe?"

"It might, Ruth, it might; nor do I think any thing to the contrary. Or
it might be given to some and not to others, just as it was good for
them. It may be that some can see some, or can see them sometimes, and
watch their ways in partial glimpses of revelation. Who knows who may be
about the house when all its mortals are dead for the night, and the
last of the fires are burning unheeded! There are so many hours of both
day and night--in most houses--in which those in and those out of the
body need never cross each others' paths! And there are tales, legends,
reports, many mere fiction doubtless, but some possibly of a different
character, which represent this and that doer of evil as compelled,
either by the law of his or her own troubled being, or by some law
external thereto, ever, or at fixed intervals, to haunt the moldering
scenes of their past, and ever dream horribly afresh the deeds done in
the body. These, however, tend to no proof of what we h