r
sins, and then go and love everybody just as Jesus loved you; and try to
make every one happy, and do good morning, noon, and night, and try to
scatter some flowers of happiness in every place to which you go; and
then you shall be with me in the land where all is bright.' And I
thought Jacob pulled the one moss-rose, and gave it to me, and said,
'This is an earthly rose; keep it as long and as carefully as you will,
it will fade at last; but our flowers never fade: try, O try, to come to
them.' I heard music, Aggie, or something like music, or perhaps like a
stream flowing along, and I felt something like the summer breeze upon
my cheeks, and Jacob was gone, and there I stood with the rose in my
hand.

"Write it down, Aggie," said the invalid, "exactly as I have told you;"
and having said this, James Courtenay dropped off into a doze again.

Some days intervened between this reference to what had passed and the
next conversation upon the subject, in which James Courtenay told
Aggie--who had to listen much against her will--what he thought about
this wonderful dream.

"I know the meaning of that dream," said James Courtenay to his nurse.
"I do not want any one to explain it to me; I can tell all about it. The
meaning is, that I must become a changed boy, or I shall never go to
heaven when I die; and all the good things which I have here are not to
be compared with those which are to be had there. What Jacob said was,
that all these things are fading, and I must seek for what is better
than anything here.

"Aggie," said James Courtenay, "you often think I am asleep when I am
not; and you think I scarcely have my mind about me yet, when I lie so
long quite still, looking away into the blue sky: but I am thinking; I
am always thinking, and very often I am praying--asking forgiveness for
the past, and hoping that I shall be changed for the future."

"But we can't do much by hoping," said Aggie, "and we can't do anything
by ourselves."

"I mean to do more than _hope_," said James Courtenay; "I mean to
_try_."

"And you mean, I trust, to ask God's Spirit to help you?" said Aggie.

"Yes, every day," said James. "He helped Jacob, and he'll help me; and I
hope to be yet where Jacob is now."

"Ay, he helps the poor," said Aggie, "and he'll help the rich. Jacob had
his trials, and you'll have yours; and perhaps yours are the hardest, so
far as going to heaven is concerned; for the rich have a temptation in
every acre