a moment and spoke to me.

"The others cannot see you as I do," she said. "Priest of the Queen of
queens, I know you well; hand in hand we climbed by the seven stairways
to the altars of the moon."

"Who is the Queen of queens?" I asked.

"Have you forgotten her of the hundred names whose veils we lifted one
by one; her whose breast was beauty and whose eyes were truth? In a day
to come you will remember. Farewell till we walk this Road no more."

"Stay--when did we meet?"

"When our souls were young," she answered, and faded from my ken like a
shadow from the sea.

After the Easterns came many others from all parts of the earth. Then
suddenly appeared a company of about six hundred folk of every age and
English in their looks. They were not so calm as are the majority of
those who make this journey. When I read the papers a few days later I
understood why. A great passenger ship had sunk suddenly in mid ocean
and they were all cut off unprepared.

When, followed by a few stragglers, these had passed and gathered
themselves in the red shadow beneath the gateway towers waiting for the
summons, an unusual thing occurred. For a few moments the Road was left
quite empty. After that last great stroke Death seemed to be resting on
his laurels. When thus unpeopled it looked a very vast place like to a
huge arched causeway, bordered on either side by blackness, but itself
gleaming with a curious phosphorescence such as once or twice I have
seen in the waters of a summer sea at night.

Presently in the very centre of this illuminated desolation, whilst it
was as yet far away, something caught my eye, something so strange to
the place, so utterly unfamiliar that I watched it earnestly, wondering
what it might be. Nearer and nearer it came, with curious, uncertain
hops; yes, a little brown object that hopped.

"Well," I said to myself, "if I were not where I am I should say that
yonder thing was a hare. Only what would a hare be doing on the Great
White Road? How could a hare tread the pathway of eternal souls? I must
be mistaken."

So I reflected whilst still the thing hopped on, until I became certain
that either I suffered from delusions, or that it was a hare; indeed a
particularly fine hare, much such a one as a friend of my old landlady,
Mrs. Smithers, had once sent her as a Christmas present from Norfolk,
which hare I ate.

A few more hops brought it opposite to my post of observation. Here it
halted as though