Egbert leaped from the carriage, and at one bound was on the vessel’s deck.  He flew to the cabin, and in a moment I heard the loud exclamations on either side, “My Evelina!” “My Egbert!” Mr. Jenks and myself followed below.  An old gentleman met us, and, though a stranger, he grasped a hand of ours in each of his, and wept with joy as he bade us welcome.  The cabin was witness of a scene which a painter well might covet for a study.  In close embrace Egbert and Evelina mingled joys that seldom are known on earth.  The old man held our hands, his face raised, eyes turned upward, while tears of happiness, such as he had never before known, coursed down his features.  The officers of the ship came hurrying in, and the crew darkened the gangway with their presence.  What a joyous time was that!  The evening was passed in recounting the adventures of each; and even I had something to add to the general recital.  It appeared that the boat in which Egbert had placed his charge was safely cleared of the wreck; and, after being floated about two days, was met by an English ship bound to London.  They, together with about twenty others who were in the boat, were soon comfortably cared for.  At the expiration of a few weeks, they reached London, and were there placed on board a vessel bound to Boston, at which place they in due season arrived.  The grief of Mrs. L. during all this time I will not attempt to describe.  The mind of my reader can better depict it than I can with pen.  Hope buoyed her up.  And, though she had seen him swept from her side into the waters where waves towered up to the skies and sank again many fathoms below, yet she did hope she might see him again on earth.

In the silent hour of night, as she lay and mused of those things, she thought she could hear a sweet voice whispering in her ear, “Berty lives, and you will meet him once again.”  And, as if in response to the voice, she said in her own mind, “I know he lives; but it may be in that bright world where, unencumbered with these mortal frames, we roam amid ever-enduring scenes.”  The voice again said, “On earth, on earth.”

But now they had met.  It was no mere vision now, and the truth flashed upon her mind that that voice she had heard and thought a dream was not all a dream.  And then she mused on as she was wont to do, and, after relating to us the incident, she said, “May it not be that much of our life that we have thought passed in dreamland, and therefore among unreal things, has been spent with actual existences?  For what is an ‘unreal thing’?  It would not be a ‘thing’ had it no existence; and what is the ‘it’ that we speak of?  Can we not then conclude that there is nothing but what is and must have an existence, though not so tangible to our senses as to enable us to handle it or see it?  What we call ‘imagination’ may be, after all, more real than the hard stones beneath our feet-less indestructible than they.”

Thus she spake, and her theory seemed very plausible to me, though my friend Jenks, who was an exceedingly precise, matter-of-fact man, could not see any foundation for the theory.