ation. I remember it for clearness as if
it had been but a day since then, but my feelings about what I
remember are as faint as if to my consciousness, as well as in fact, a
hundred years had intervened. Perhaps it is possible to explain this,
too. The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of
time in making the past seem remote. When I first woke from that
trance, my former life appeared as yesterday, but now, since I have
learned to know my new surroundings, and to realize the prodigious
changes that have transformed the world, I no longer find it hard, but
very easy, to realize that I have slept a century. Can you conceive of
such a thing as living a hundred years in four days? It really seems
to me that I have done just that, and that it is this experience which
has given so remote and unreal an appearance to my former life. Can
you see how such a thing might be?"

"I can conceive it," replied Edith, meditatively, "and I think we
ought all to be thankful that it is so, for it will save you much
suffering, I am sure."

"Imagine," I said, in an effort to explain, as much to myself as to
her, the strangeness of my mental condition, "that a man first heard
of a bereavement many, many years, half a lifetime perhaps, after the
event occurred. I fancy his feeling would be perhaps something as mine
is. When I think of my friends in the world of that former day, and
the sorrow they must have felt for me, it is with a pensive pity,
rather than keen anguish, as of a sorrow long, long ago ended."

"You have told us nothing yet of your friends," said Edith. "Had you
many to mourn you?"

"Thank God, I had very few relatives, none nearer than cousins," I
replied. "But there was one, not a relative, but dearer to me than any
kin of blood. She had your name. She was to have been my wife soon. Ah
me!"

"Ah me!" sighed the Edith by my side. "Think of the heartache she must
have had."

Something in the deep feeling of this gentle girl touched a chord in
my benumbed heart. My eyes, before so dry, were flooded with the tears
that had till now refused to come. When I had regained my composure, I
saw that she too had been weeping freely.

"God bless your tender heart," I said. "Would you like to see her
picture?"

A small locket with Edith Bartlett's picture, secured about my neck
with a gold chain, had lain upon my breast all through that long
sleep, and removing this I opened and gave it to my companion. She