act the faith of my early days. It still seems to me that when I
have finished playing my poor part in life, when I no longer run in the
overgrown paths that lead to the unattainable, when I am through amusing
humanity with my conceits and my sorrows, I will go there where my
mother, who has gone before me, is, and she will receive me; and the
smile of serenity that she now wears in my memory will have become one
of triumphant realization.

True, I see that distant region only dimly, and it has no more substance
than a pale gray vision; my words, however intangible and elusive, give
too definite a form to my dreamy conceptions. But still (I speak as a
little child, with the child's faith), but still I always think of my
mother as having, in that far off place, preserved her earthly aspect.
I think of her with her dear white curls and the straight lines of her
beautiful profile that the years may have impaired a little, but which I
still find perfect. The thought that the face of my mother shall one
day disappear from my eyes forever, that it is no more than combined
elements subject to disintegration, and that she will be lost in the
universal abyss of nothingness, not only makes my heart bleed, but it
causes me to revolt as at something unthinkable and monstrous; it cannot
be! I have the feeling that there is about her something which death
cannot touch.

My love for my mother (the only changeless love of my life) is so free
from all material feeling that that alone gives me an inexplicable hope,
almost gives me a confidence in the immortality of the soul.

I cannot very well understand why the vision of my mother near my bed of
sickness should that morning have impressed me so vividly, for she was
nearly always with me. It all seems very mysterious; it is as if at that
particular moment she was for the first time revealed to me.

And why among the treasured playthings of my childhood has the tiny
watering-pot taken on the value and sacred dignity of a relic? So much
so indeed, that when I am far distant on the ocean, in hours of danger,
I think of it with tenderness, and see it in the place where it has
lain for years, in the little bureau, never opened, mixed in with broken
toys; and should it disappear I would feel as if I had lost an amulet
that could not be replaced.

And the simple shawl of lilac barege, found recently among some old
clothing laid aside to be given to the poor, why have I put it away as
care