vened. Perhaps it is possible to explain this, too. The
effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in
making the past seem remote. When I first woke from that trance, my
former life appeared as yesterday, but now, since I have learned to
know my new surroundings, and to realize the prodigious changes that
have transformed the world, I no longer find it hard, but very easy, to
realize that I have slept a century. Can you conceive of such a thing
as living a hundred years in four days? It really seems to me that I
have done just that, and that it is this experience which has given so
remote and unreal an appearance to my former life. Can you see how such
a thing might be?"

"I can conceive it," replied Edith, meditatively, "and I think we ought
all to be thankful that it is so, for it will save you much suffering,
I am sure."

"Imagine," I said, in an effort to explain, as much to myself as to
her, the strangeness of my mental condition, "that a man first heard of
a bereavement many, many years, half a lifetime perhaps, after the
event occurred. I fancy his feeling would be perhaps something as mine
is. When I think of my friends in the world of that former day, and the
sorrow they must have felt for me, it is with a pensive pity, rather
than keen anguish, as of a sorrow long, long ago ended."

"You have told us nothing yet of your friends," said Edith. "Had you
many to mourn you?"

"Thank God, I had very few relatives, none nearer than cousins," I
replied. "But there was one, not a relative, but dearer to me than any
kin of blood. She had your name. She was to have been my wife soon. Ah
me!"

"Ah me!" sighed the Edith by my side. "Think of the heartache she must
have had."

Something in the deep feeling of this gentle girl touched a chord in my
benumbed heart. My eyes, before so dry, were flooded with the tears
that had till now refused to come. When I had regained my composure, I
saw that she too had been weeping freely.

"God bless your tender heart," I said. "Would you like to see her
picture?"

A small locket with Edith Bartlett's picture, secured about my neck
with a gold chain, had lain upon my breast all through that long sleep,
and removing this I opened and gave it to my companion. She took it
with eagerness, and after poring long over the sweet face, touched the
picture with her lips.

"I know that she was good and lovely enough to well deserve your
tears," she said; "but rememb