e parlour. There was a seraphic smile on her face--pale, pure, and
beautiful as death. She was gazing with an humble, heavenly earnestness
on us. The parting blessing of the stranger shed a sweet and hallowed
influence on my heart. I went into the parlour, to my darling: childless
she was now; I had now need to be a tender companion to her.

She raised her arms in a sort of transport, with the same smile of
gratitude and purity, and, throwing them round my neck, she said--

"I have seen him--it is he--the man that came with you to the door, and
blessed us as he went away--is the same I saw in my dream--the same who
took little baby in his arms, and said he would take care of him, and
give him safely to me again."

More than a quarter of a century has glided away since then; other
children have been given us by the good God--children who have been, from
infancy to maturity, a pride and blessing to us. Sorrows and reverses,
too, have occasionally visited us; yet, on the whole, we have been
greatly blessed; prosperity has long since ended all the cares of the
_res angusta domi_, and expanded our power of doing good to our
fellow-creatures. God has given it; and God, we trust, directs its
dispensation. In our children, and--would you think it?--our
_grand_-children, too, the same beneficent God has given us objects that
elicit and return all the delightful affections, and exchange the sweet
converse that makes home and family dearer than aught else, save that
blessed home where the Christian family shall meet at last.

The dear companion of my early love and sorrows still lives, blessed be
Heaven! The evening tints of life have fallen upon her; but the dear
remembrance of a first love, that never grew cold, makes her beauty
changeless for me. As for your humble servant, he is considerably her
senior, and looks it: time has stolen away his raven locks, and given
him a _chevelure_ of snow instead. But, as I said before, I and my wife
love, and, I believe, _admire_ one another more than ever; and I have
often seen our elder children smile archly at one another, when they
thought we did not observe them, thinking, no doubt, how like a pair of
lovers we two were.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK J. S. LE FANU'S GHOSTLY TALES,
VOLUME 4***

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