ession of his eager watchfulness for the
signs of human faithfulness.

Not all unrewarded was that watch. The world held some faithful
hearts,--let us not ask how many,--lovers of invisible faces and voices
heard no more, men and women who still shared their joys and sorrows
with unseen comrades, and drank the cup of life as a sacrament of
remembrance.

This sharing with the dead seemed to Theophil the essential of
faithfulness,--faithfulness taking many forms, sometimes maybe
misrepresentative of itself, and seldom perhaps informing its
conventional externals.

A time will come in the profoundest griefs when those rituals to which
young grief is so eager to vow itself will grow lifeless and
conventional, the daily tasks of remembrance become as the told beads of
pattered prayers. Let the worshipper of relics beware lest his
treasures some day turn on his hands to so much irksome lumber, and true
sorrow be thus humiliated.

No! the service for the dead which is most likely to remain a vital
offering of the heart is not the ceremonial sorrow of specially
consecrated times and seasons, but rather the simple longing in hours of
joy that _they_ could have been with us. To think of our dead friends as
always in their shrouds is a way of remembrance which we shall not long
have heart or even interest to follow. It is only by taking them to our
feasts, keeping up with them the same old human companionship, that we
may hope to keep the dead as friends. A modern poet has written eight
lines which were of great comfort to Theophil,--

"You go not to the headstone
As aforetime every day,
And I who died, I do not chide,
Because, dear friend, you play;

"But in your playing think of him
Who once was kind and dear,
And if you see a beauteous thing,
Just say: 'He is not here.'"

Here it seemed to Theophil was the whole duty of faithfulness. The dead
know that if we remember them in our hours of joy, they are indeed
remembered; and if they know anything at all, they will understand the
waywardness of sad hearts better than sad hearts understand themselves.

Yet, indeed, save in the exercise of his faculties, Theophil had no joy
to reproach himself with. Surely returning spring, with its terrible
exuberance of warm life, was no joy. Perhaps he had looked on Jenny
lying dead with less anguish than he one day beheld an apple-tree thick
with blossom in the hot sun. Yes! the world