hite ashes which some one may care for, to go out
and mingle with the pure air, and there to be one of earth's good
things, and to be breathed in again and make part of the life of the
maple leaf, or the young girl going to school in the morning, or the
old-fashioned pinks in the front yard of the old-fashioned people, or
the red roses in the florist's hot-houses. I have that fancy.

I am worried because I, clumsy, dull-thinking man, cannot tell what I
wish to tell of a life I saw. I am worried because I cannot make
others understand it as it was. It seems to me it would do some good
in the world. It seems to me that many a man and woman, if they could
know about Grant and Jean, who really lived,--for this is but a tale of
fact,--would be now more loving and better men and women because of it.
But I do not know how to tell of what I saw and what I knew.

Grant was over sixty years old at this time of which I write, and I am
coming very near the end, and Jean was past forty, and the two were not
much different from what they were when I first saw them together. I
suppose it was partly because I had been with them so much that I did
not note the changes nature wrought in this pair of her children, but
certainly they were far younger than their years. They had found
together the only fountain of eternal youth which exists or ever will
exist upon this planet which threw off a barren moon and bred monsters
and, later, mastodons and apes, and finally made a specialty of men and
women. They laughed at time, and hoped for a future of souls after
this trial. I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, when they
spoke together. They were blended, and it made life worth the living.
What I learned conveyed to me new things. It taught me that all there
is in novels is not romance nor untrue. It taught me that a male and
female of this species of ours may meet, and from the two may come an
entity which is something very near divine. Why is it, I wonder, that
the right man and the right woman out of the hundreds of millions meet
so seldom at the fitting time, and that life is either so barren or so
jagged and hurtful because of the non-meeting of those who should be
mated? What a world this might be! Of course, though, there is some
higher thought, and it is all right in some way.

They were what you would call religious, Grant and Jean. They liked
the same church--it doesn't matter which it was--and attended
regu