nion may be a bold one; but there is
reason for believing that it is somewhat widely held. We naturally tend
to materialise when we build up our several pictures; but we sin here, if
at all, in the best of company. The city that lay foursquare, and that is
described to us in the vision in the Island of Patmos, was of pure gold,
with walls of jasper and gates of precious stones, and had within it
trees and birds and many divers animals, and material things of greatest
beauty, besides the figures of innumerable angels. The description could
not have been otherwise drawn if it was to be grasped by the mind of man,
even to a limited extent. So with ourselves. To conceive of a world with
all the attributes of beauty yet without flowers is impossible. To
realise a world full of music and song yet without birds may be possible,
but transcends the powers of most minds. To attempt to believe in the
happiness of a world where companionship is to be looked for and reunion
is promised, yet where the companionship of dogs is denied, is to strain
the belief of some to the uttermost and not improbably to fail.

"Nor," writes Bishop Butler in his immortal treatise, "can we find
anything throughout the whole analogy of nature to afford us even the
slightest presumption that animals ever lose their living powers; much
less, if it were possible, that they lose them by death: for we have no
faculties wherewith to trace any beyond or through it, so as to see what
becomes of them. This event removes them from our view. It destroys the
sensible proof, which we had before death, of their being possessed of
living powers, but does not appear to afford the least reason to believe
that they are, then, or by that event, deprived of them. And our knowing
that they were possessed of these powers, up to the very period to which
we have faculties capable of tracing them, is itself a probability of
their retaining them beyond it."

When Robert Southey looked for the last time on his old friend,
Phillis--and there is a bitter difference on such an occasion between
looking upon the young and the old--he tells how often in his earlier
days this dog and he had enjoyed childish sports together, and how, later
on, when hard times overtook him, he found delight in recalling the
faithful fondness of the friend in the distant home, and longed to feel
again the warmth of his dumb welcome. Then, when the old dog is at last
dead, and there has come a severance of