u?" he said, and smiled--"Well, think so, if it pleases you.
Good-night--and again God bless you!"

He patted the tiny head of the small Charlie, whom she held nestling
against her breast.

"Good-night, Charlie!"

The little dog licked his hand and looked at him wistfully.

"Don't part with him, Mary!" he said, suddenly--"Let him always have a
home with you!"

"Now, David! You really are tired out and over-melancholy! As if I
should ever part with him!" And she kissed Charlie's silky head--"We'll
all keep together! Good-night, David!"

"Good-night!" he answered. He watched her as she went through the
doorway, holding the dog in her arms and turning back to smile at him
over her shoulder--anon he listened to her footfall ascending the
stairway to her own room--then, to her gentle movements to and fro above
his bed--till presently all was silent. Silence--except for the measured
plash of the sea, which he heard distinctly echoing up through the
coombe from the shore. A great loneliness environed him--touched by a
great awe. He felt himself to be a solitary soul in the midst of some
vast desert, yet not without the consciousness that a mystic joy, an
undreamed-of glory, was drawing near that should make that desert
"blossom like the rose." He moved slowly and feebly to the
window--against one-half of the latticed pane leaned a bunch of white
roses, shining with a soft pearl hue in the light of a lovely moon.

"It is a beautiful world!" he said, half aloud--"No one in his right
mind could leave it without some regret!"

Then an inward voice seemed to whisper to him--

"You knew nothing of this world you call so beautiful before you entered
it; may there not be another world still more beautiful of which you
equally know nothing, but of which you are about to make an experience,
all life being a process of continuous higher progress?"

And this idea now not only seemed to him possible but almost a
certainty. For as our last Laureate expresses it:--

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant--
More life, and fuller, that I want!"

His brain was so active and his memory so clear that he was somewhat
surprised to feel his body so feeble and aching, when at last he
undressed, and lay down to sleep. He thought of many things--of his
boyhood's home out i