ld give any
casuist pause, and it's beyond my powers without some further thought.
Your doubt, as I now understand it, is not of immortality, but of
mortality; and there I can't meet you in argument without entirely
forsaking my own ground. If it will not seem harsh, I will confess that
your doubt is rather consoling to me; for I have so much faith in the
Love which rules the world that I am perfectly willing to accept
reexistence on any terms that Love may offer. You may say that this is
because I have not yet exhausted the potentialities of experience, and
am still interested in my own identity; and one half of this, at least,
I can't deny. But even if it were otherwise, I should trust to find
among those Many Mansions which we are told of some chamber where I
should be at rest without being annihilated; and I can even imagine my
being glad to do any sort of work about the House, when I was tired of
resting."

VIII.

"I am _glad_ you said that to him!" cried Ewbert's wife, when he told
her of his interview with old Hilbrook. "That will give him something to
think about. What did he say?"

Ewbert had been less and less satisfied with his reply to Hilbrook, in
which it seemed to him that he had passed from mockery to reproof, with
no great credit to himself; and his wife's applause now set the seal to
his displeasure with it.

"Oh, he said simply that he could understand a younger person feeling
differently, and that he did not wish to set himself up as a censor. But
he could not pretend that he was glad to have been called out of
nonentity into being, and that he could imagine nothing better than
eternal unconsciousness."

"Well?"

"I told him that his very words implied the refusal of his being to
accept nonentity again; that they expressed, or adumbrated, the
conception of an eternal consciousness of the eternal unconsciousness he
imagined himself longing for. I'm not so sure they did, now."

"Of _course_ they did. And _then_ what did he say?"

"He said nothing in direct reply; he sighed, and dropped his poor old
head on his breast, and seemed very tired; so that I tried talking of
other things for a while, and then I came away. Emily, I'm afraid I
wasn't perfectly candid, perfectly kind, with him."

"I don't see how you could have been more so!" she retorted, in tender
indignation with him against himself. "And I think what he said was
terrible. It was bad enough for him to pretend to believe that he w