“You were early an orphan; you do not remember your mother; but I do; ah, how well!  I saw her the last time she ever saw you.  You were brought to her bedside when she was in the full possession of all her faculties, and deeply conscious that she had not many hours to live.  She looked at you as you were held in your nurse’s arms, smiling upon her with to me an agonizing unconsciousness of your approaching orphanage.  She gazed upon you with that intense look of inexpressible affection which only maternal love, sharpened by death, can give; she looked long and earnestly, but spoke not one syllable.  As you were at length taken from the room, she followed you with her eyes till the door closed, and then it seemed as if the light of this world had been quenched in them for ever.  ‘I charge you,’ she said at length, ’let me see him again.’  I made a motion as if to recall the attendant ‘Not here,’ she added, laying her hand gently on my arm, and I understood her but too well.  You know whether I have in any degree fulfilled my trust.  But is it possible that I can think of an utter failure, and not be more than troubled?  And if Christianity be true, and if I am so happy as to obtain admission to that ’blessed country into which an enemy never entered, and from which a friend never went away,’ and she whom I loved so well should ask me why you come not,—­that she had tarried for you long,—­must I say that you will never come? that her child had wandered from the fold of the Good Shepherd, and had gone I knew not whither? that I sought him in the lonely glens and mountains, but found him not?  I hardly know, but I almost think—­such was the love she had for you—­that such reply would shade that radiant face even amidst the glories of Paradise.  And now—­let all this be a dream—­suppose that not simply by your own fault you will never see that mother more, but that from the sad truth of your no truth—­you never can; that the ’Vale, vale, in aeternum, vale,’ is all that you can say to her:  yet I say this,—­that to live only in the hope of the possibility of fulfilling the better wishes of such a friend, and rejoining her for ever in (if you will) the fabulous ‘islands of the blest,’ would not only make you a happier, but even a nobler, being than your present mood can ever make you.  My fabulous is better than your true.”

I felt that he was not unmoved.  I was myself moved too much to allow me to stay any longer, and saying that I could find my way very well to my chamber in the dark, where I had the means of kindling a light, I softly closed the door and left him. ____