quite forgotten
that he was a chairman, and had to be nudged to announce the next piece.

This was a very strange poem, and made you feel like a stained-glass
window; it was full of incense, but it was full of something else
too. It began

"The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven" ...

and there was something in the voice that suggested such a height up
above the world that you drew your breath lest she should fall over. And
there was a lover crying in the poem, you could hear him crying far
away down on the earth, and there were some lines which went:

"We two will lie i' the shadow of
That mystic living tree
Within whose secret growth the Dove
Is sometimes felt to be" ...

that made you feel what a strange holy thing love was, after all; and
then there was a curious verse with nothing but women's names in it, yet
somehow it seemed the loveliest of all; and when again you came out of
the voice, you were not crying but feeling wonderfully blest somehow and
rather frightened. Jenny sent a wonderful look to Theophil--it was so
they should bathe together in God's sight--and Theophil sent back as
wonderful a look as a chairman dare venture on. Otherwise, of course, it
would have been as wonderful as Jenny's.

Thus did Isabel Strange recite at New Zion; and perhaps one can best
judge of the impression she made, from the fact that the little boys at
the back, who during the last lecture on "Henrik Ibsen" had discovered
a most exciting new way of making continued existence possible, quite
forgot it and would have to keep it for Sunday afternoon Sunday-school.

Everyone went home in a dream, and little Jenny shone like a light with
the excitement and wonder of it all.

"How wonderful you are! Doesn't it seem strange to be so wonderful?"
said Jenny afterwards, as the two girls took off their outdoor things in
Jenny's room.

"Dear child!" said Isabel, kissing Jenny on her brow, "it is you that
are wonderful."

There is no joy in the world better worth seeing, better worth living,
than the joy of young people with the same dreams, the same thoughts,
and--so important--the same words for them, blown together by some
unexpected conjunction of the four winds, met by some blissful
dispensation of the planets of youth.

There have been periods in history especially favourable for the ecstasy
of such meetings, early mornings of the human spirit, when lovely new
tr