track.

"No, clear and broad and unobstructed the luminous pathways may lay
all round us onknown to us. Noiseless chariots, swifter than our
imaginations can grasp now, may cleave these star routes, connecting
one land to another, and mebby jinin' immense distances to our planet,
as easy as we can hitch up and go to Jonesville.

"We don't see these noiseless conveyances, lighter and swifter than
thought, nor the forms they waft to us from afar. We can't hear their
voices, but our soul listens! We feel their nearness! For a blessed
moment we are thrilled with the bliss of their presence, their full
comprehension of pity and love.

"'Dear ones!' our heart cries, 'where are you? Come nearer! Let our
eyes behold you!' Our soul peers longin'ly through the mist of earthly
blindness, looking! listening!'"

I wuz carried some distance away from myself by my deep eppisodin'
when a sigh from Faith brung me down and landed me on terry firmy agin
and I sez,

"Why do you ask this question to-night, dear?"

"Because," sez she in a tremblin' voice, "I feel that someone long
gone and lost is near me to-night, I feel the presence nearer than you
are now," sez she, puttin' her little white tremblin' hand on my own.

"I am not mistaken," sez she with streaming eyes, "I know that in
whatever world or distant way that soul may be dwellin', it is with me
to-night. It frightens me!" sez she, white as a cloth, "And it fills
me with the blessedness of Heaven!" And she smiled with her big
luminous eyes. She wuz tremblin' like a popple leaf.

"Well, well," sez I, "shet up the winder, and take a little catnip
tea. I'll steep it on my alcohol lamp, and go to bed. You've been
excited too much to-night." I knew, though she didn't say so, that the
very idee of catnip wuz repugnant and oncongenial to her at that time,
but I felt that I had reason and common sense on my side. Faithful
hain't over strong, and had been through considerable excitement,
besides I hearn the distant step of my pardner, and his voice
parleyin' with the hall boy for sunthin'.

And though the subject broached by Faith, and believed in by me, wuz
as interestin' to me as a subject could be, yet I felt then, and feel
now, that though transcendentalism may be more agreable talkin'
matter, and may be indulged in at times, yet such commonplace subjects
as herb drink has to be brung forwards and sort o' hung onto by our
minds, in order to anchor 'em as it were to the land of