e-blossom and rice. Alice, dear, awaken. Ah, did you have
strange dreams, poor girl--dream that you were dead! Indeed, it was a
dream--an evil dream.'

And, then, as Alice stepped bewildered homewards, to steal down into her
place, and listen, and listen, till the sound of carriages rolled towards
the gate, listen till the low hush of the marriage service broke into the
wild happy laughter of the organ, and the babbling sound of sweet girls
stole through the church porch; then to lie back and to think that Alice
and Edward had been married after all--that your little useless life had
been so much use, at least: just to dream of that awhile, and then softly
fall asleep.

Ah, who would not give all his remaining days to ransom his beloved
dead?--to give them the joys they missed, the hopes they clutched at, the
dreams they dreamed? O river that runs so sweetly by their feet, when you
shall have stopped running will they rise? O sun that shines above their
heads, when you have ceased from shining will they come to us again? When
the lark shall have done with singing, and the hawthorn bud no more, shall
we then, indeed, hear the voices of our beloved, sweeter than song of
river or bird?

THE APPARITION OF YOUTH

Sententious people are fond of telling us that we change entirely every
seven years, that in that time every single atomy of body (and soul?)
finds a substitute. Personally, I am of opinion that we change oftener,
that rather we are triennial in our constitution. In fact, it is a change
we owe to our spiritual cleanliness. But there is a truth pertaining to
the change of which the sententious people are not, I think, aware. When
they speak of our sloughing our dead selves, they imagine the husk left
behind as a dead length of hollow scale or skin. Would it were so. These
sententious people, with all their information, have probably never gone
through the process of which they speak. They have never changed from the
beginning, but have been consistently their dull selves all through. To
those, however, who can look back on many a metamorphosis, the
quick-change artists of life, a fearful thing is known. The length of
discarded snake lies glistering in the greenwood, motionless, and slowly
perishes with the fallen leaves in autumn. But for the dead self is no
autumn. By some mysterious law of spiritual propagation, it breaks away
from us, a living thing, as the offspring of primitive organisms are, it
is s