MARHAM.

Very easily, I should think; as you have lived thirty years in this world, and into the other have never had one glance.

AUBIN.

But, dear uncle, I think I may have had. For I am of two worlds, matter and spirit. With these gray eyes I have never known the world of spirit, but known it I have through certain feelings, very faintly, and yet plainly, as I think.

MARHAM.

But still, as you say, very faintly.

AUBIN.

And very little, too, is my knowledge of this world. It is not unlikely, I think, on my dying, that the other world will feel as familiar to me as this does. For body and breathing, table, chair, and house, are unfelt, and are nothing to me, while I am in thought; so that when I am in spirit they will not be much missed, perhaps. And then there are states of mind which will be as common to me hereafter as here, and more so; so that with them, at once, I shall be familiar. prayer, the furniture of my room is forgotten, and praying hereafter in our Father's house, the fresh splendor of it will be forgotten. And I shall feel and be what I am now at times, but more purely, - a worshipper only. And other states of mind there will be, in which, at once, I shall feel as

In

native to the world of spirits as I do to this world of earth.

MARHAM.

Still, death is a leaving of one world for another.

AUBIN.

So it is. And life is an outliving of world after world. Where is now what the world was to you at ten years old? It is gone, gone for ever. And where is the world which you saw and felt, and which you hoped in, at twenty? You are not in it now, and you never will be again, -never again.

But it is a very different world to your judgment and to your imagination, and to your heart. While sight is but one of our faculties, and in this instance the least sufficient one. For though the world looks to be in the same place which it was in fifty years ago, yet it is widely away from it, having gone along with the sun towards the constellation Hercules.

MARHAM.

O the depth of the wisdom of God, and his ways past finding out!

Yes, dear uncle.

for waiting death in.

AUBIN.

And that is the right mood

I mean, a trustful consciousness of the mystery of the universe.

MARHAM.

The world of my boyhood, and that of my youth, and this of my old age, have been quite different from one another, and would have felt quite distinct, only that it was by little and little that the first changed into the second, and the second into the third. A third world am I living in? Then the fourth, which waits me, is in a quite natural course. But it will be more sudden than the others. One moment, the soul is in this life, and the next, in another.

AUBIN.

So it is. But very often the soul outgrows this world before the other world opens above it. And in a last long sickness, many a Christian soul grows more akin to the great family in heaven than it ever was to fellow-creatures in this earth. And with an old man, shorter and shorter are his walks round home, and the cunning of his hand grows less and less; dimmer and dimmer grow his eyes, and more and more dull his ears, and less and less of this earth he becomes, till at last he is not of this earth at all.

MARHAM.

I was young, but now I am old. This change I have lived through, and my next great change will be death.

AUBIN.

From manhood of thirty to old age of eighty

Be

seems a great change; but in this present life, there is a change which is greater and more sudden, and it is at the time when a youth first makes out what it is to be a man, and, instead of a dreamer, he has suddenly to be a doer and a sufferer. Often let a youth know himself to be a man, and then he will not shrink much from the thought of being an old man and a dying man. For he has known and outlived the greatest vicissitude, when of a youth he became a man. cause the world to come is not stranger than the reality of this world is to a young man, sometimes; and for him to feel the strangeness of it, and part with his hopes and old feelings, is not less painful, nay, is worse, than parting with the flesh. One way or another, we most of us have changes come over us that frighten us more than death, and at the first feeling of which we have every one of us said, perhaps, "Would God that I might die !" These seasons it is well for us to remember and live over again. And we will do it. We shall have tears in our eyes the while, and a choking in our throats, perhaps. But our minds will be the better for such recollections, and our hearts will open the more earnestly into prayer. And when we feel how God was in our sorrows, we shall trust the more blessedly that he will be in our deaths.

MARHAM.

And so he will be, and blessedly so, we will hope. For we cannot die without him, any more than be born. And now that we must die, we will think of the times when we would have died if we could. And I will think of them to make me the more resigned when I remember that I am old; for old age is only a slow dying.

AUBIN.

Growing old is like bodily existence refining away into spiritual life. True, the ripeness of the soul is hidden in the decay of the body; but so is many a ripe fruit in its husk.

MARHAM.

So strangely old age does alter us, Oliver.

AUBIN.

A man vain of his person may be dismayed by looking thoughtfully on the face of old age; but, rightly looked at, there is to be read in every line of it the exhortation, "Be of good cheer." Only let us love God, and then all things of God's doing look lovely, and promise us good. To a good old man, his gray hair is a crown; and it may be worn, and it ought to be, like what has been given as an earnest of the crown of immortality.

MARHAM.

Our hearts keep beating not by our wills, and our looks change by a will not our own, but one to be trusted in infinitely.