er near their ashes as if regretting an unfinished life, or the
opportunities that have departed; but those dying after middle age are
usually glad to be free from their bodies, and seldom think of them
again."

"I shall append the lines now in my head to my history," said
Cortlandt, "that where it goes they may go also. They can scarcely
fail to be instructive as the conclusions of a man who has seen beyond
his grave." Whereupon he wrote a stanza in his note-book, and closed
it without showing his companions what he had written.

"May they do all the good you hope, and much more!" replied the spirit,
"for the reward in the resurrection morning will vastly exceed all your
labours now.

"O, my friends," the spirit continued most earnestly, addressing the
three, "are you prepared for your death-beds? When your eyes glaze in
their last sleep, and you lose that temporal world and what you perhaps
considered all, as in a haze, your dim vision will then be displaced by
the true creation that will be eternal. Your unattained ambitions,
your hopes, and your ideals will be swallowed in the grave. Your works
will secure you a place in history, and many will remember your names
until, in time, oblivion covers your memory as the grass conceals your
tombs. Are you prepared for the time when your eyes become blind, and
your trusted senses fail? Your sorrowing friends will mourn, and the
flags of your clubs will fly at half-mast, but no earthly thing can
help you then. In what condition will the resurrection morning find
you, when your sins of neglect and commission plead for vengeance, as
Abel's blood from the ground? After that there can be no change. The
classification, as I have already told you, is now going on; it will
then be finished."

"We are the most utterly wretched sinners!" cried Ayrault. "Show us
how we can be saved."

"As an inhabitant of spirit-land, I will give you worldly counsel,"
replied the bishop. "During my earthly administration, as I told you,
people came from far to hear me preach. This was because I had
eloquence and earnestness, both gifts of God. But I was a miserably
weak sinner myself. That which I would, I did not, and that which I
would not that I did; and I often prayed my congregation to follow my
sermons rather than my ways. I seemed to do my followers good, and
Daniel thus commends my way in his last chapter: 'They that turn many
to righteousness shall shine as the stars fo