sh of radiance, like the fragment of a rainbow, struck
dazzlingly across my sight. Darkness? What had I to do with darkness? I
knew not the word--I was only conscious of light--light exquisitely
pure and brilliant--light through which I stepped as easily as a bird
flies in air. Perfectly awake to my sensations, I felt somehow that
there was nothing remarkable in them--I seemed to be at home in some
familiar element. Delicate hands held mine--a face far lovelier than
the loveliest face of woman ever dreamed by poet or painter, smiled
radiantly at me, and I smiled back again. A voice whispered in strange
musical murmurs, such as I well seemed to know and comprehend:

"Gaze behind thee ere the picture fades."

I obeyed, half reluctantly, and saw as a passing shadow in a glass, or
a sort of blurred miniature painting, the room where Heliobas stood,
watching some strange imperfect shape, which I seemed faintly to
recognise. It looked like a small cast in clay, very badly executed, of
the shape I at present wore; but it was incomplete, as though the
sculptor had given it up as a failure and gone away, leaving it
unfinished.

"Did I dwell in that body?" I mused to myself, as I felt the perfection
of my then state of being. "How came I shut in such a prison? How poor
a form--how destitute of faculties--how full of infirmities--how
limited in capabilities--how narrow in all intelligence--how
ignorant--how mean!"

And I turned for relief to the shining companion who held me, and
obeying an impulse suddenly imparted, I felt myself floating higher and
higher till the last limits of the atmosphere surrounding the Earth
were passed, and fields of pure and cloudless ether extended before us.
Here we met myriads of creatures like ourselves, all hastening in
various directions--all lovely and radiant as a dream of the fairies.
Some of these beings were quite tiny and delicate--some of lofty
stature and glorious appearance: their forms were human, yet so
refined, improved, and perfected, that they were unlike, while so like
humanity.

"Askest thou nothing?" whispered the voice beside me.

"Tell me," I answered, "what I must know."

"These spirits that we behold," went on the voice, "are the guardians
of all the inhabitants of all the planets. Their labours are those of
love and penitence. Their work is to draw other souls to God--to
attract them by warnings, by pleading, by praying. They have all worn
the garb of mortality thems