My Library

commencing. Let thy motto be—TRY! Despond not, but ever remember that how bitter soever our lot may be, that despite it all, WE MAY BE HAPPY YET! Peace, poor child! Thou’rt watched and guarded by thy mother!’ ‘and the stranger,’ added another, and more silvery voice from out the deep stillness of that noon-tide heaven. I knew that mystic voice—the first one—and felt that it was from beyond Time’s threshold. I trusted it’s sacred words of promise, for I had, child as I was, an unshaken faith, an intuition, if you will, that instant flowing to me, that my blessed mother still lived. “From that hour commenced a strange, double existence to and in me. Two instances, perfectly true in all respects, I will relate, either of which forever settled in my mind that some human beings consciously survive the ordeal of death. Not long after my irreparable loss, I, along with several other children, went to bed in the roof chamber of that dark old house. Something had occurred of a merry turn, and we were all brimful of joy and glee, and our mirth was as loud as it dared be for fear of the ogres down stairs, who had a bad habit of enforcing silence through the medium of sundry straps and birch twigs. In the very midst of the uproar the bedclothes were slowly, carefully lifted from off us by agencies totally invisible. We pulled them back; but again and again they were removed, and the movement was accompanied by a din