remember--a long time ago it seems, and yet I am not so old as Saul's
mother--the first knowledge that I had of life. I saw the sun come up
one morning out of the sea, and with it there came out of the night of
my past a consciousness. I was a soul, and held relations separate from
other souls to that risen sun and that sea. From that hour I grew into
life. A growth from the Unseen came to me with every day, born I knew
not how into my soul. I sent out nothing to people the future. All came
to me.

Is this true, this faith or fancy that God sends a tidal wave through
man, bringing with it from Heaven's ocean fragments set afloat from its
shore to lodge in our lives, until there comes an ebb, and then begin
our hopes and desires all to tend heavenward, or _elsewhere?_ Have
you never felt, do you not now feel, that there is more of yourself
_somewhere else_ than there is upon the Earth?

I like to think thus, when I see a person ill, or in sorrow, or weighed
down with weary griefs. I like to think that that which is ebbing here
is flowing and ripening into fitness for the freed soul in that land
where there shall be "no more sea."

In insanity, does the kind Lord remove _all_ from this world in order
to fit up the new life more gloriously? and are those whom most we pity
clasped the closest in the Living Arms?

It may be,--there is such comfort in possibilities.

Will Saul come to-night? I am all alone on the Big Blue. There's not
another settled claim for miles away.

The August sun drank up the moisture from our corn-fields, took out the
blood of our prairie-grasses, and God sent no cooling rains. Why?

Skylight was charmful for a while. I had forgotten Saul's assertion that
he was a pale shadow of Waubeeneemah, as we forget a dream of our latest
sleep.

At my home Aunt Carter appeared one day, and said she had "come to spend
the afternoon and stay to tea"; and she seated her amplitude of being in
Saul's favorite chair, and began to count the stitches in the heel of
the twenty-fourth stocking that she assured me "she had knit every
stitch of since the night she saw my husband lift me down at the gate
just outside the window." Her blue eyes went down deeper and deeper
into the bluer yarn her fingers were threading; and after a long pause,
during which I had forgotten her presence, and was counting out the
hours on the face of the clock which the slow hands must travel over
before Saul would be at home, suddenly