est of wind
and rain forced us to seek protection in the vaulted doorway of a lone
chapelry: and we sat face to face, each on the stone bench alongside
the low, weather-stained wall, and as close as possible to the massy
door.

After a pause of silence: "Even thus," said he, "like two strangers
that have fled to the same shelter from the same storm, not seldom do
despair and hope meet for the first time in the porch of death!" "All
extremes meet," I answered; "but yours was a strange and visionary
thought." "The better then doth it beseem both the place and me," he
replied. "From a visionary wilt thou hear a vision? Mark that vivid
flash through this torrent of rain! Fire and water. Even here thy
adage holds true, and its truth is the moral of my vision." I
entreated him to proceed. Sloping his face toward the arch and yet
averting his eye from it, he seemed to seek and prepare his words:
till listening to the wind that echoed within the hollow edifice, and
to the rain without,

"Which stole on his thoughts with its two-fold sound,
The clash hard by and the murmur all round,"

he gradually sank away, alike from me and from his own purpose, and
amid the gloom of the storm and in the duskiness of that place he sat
like an emblem on a rich man's sepulchre, or like an aged mourner on
the sodded grave of an only one, who is watching the waned moon and
sorroweth not. Starting at length from his brief trance of
abstraction, with courtesy and an atoning smile he renewed his
discourse, and commenced his parable:

"During one of those short furloughs from the service of the body,
which the soul may sometimes obtain even in this, its militant state,
I found myself in a vast plain, which I immediately knew to be the
Valley of Life. It possessed an astonishing diversity of soils: and
here was a sunny spot, and there a dark one, forming just such a
mixture of sunshine and shade as we may have observed on the
mountain's side in an April day, when the thin broken clouds are
scattered over heaven. Almost in the very entrance of the valley stood
a large and gloomy pile, into which I seemed constrained to enter.
Every part of the building was crowded with tawdry ornaments and
fantastic deformity. On every window was portrayed, in glaring and
inelegant colours, some horrible tale or preternatural incident, so
that not a ray of light could enter, untinged by the medium through
which it passed. The body of the building was full