A young girl came up while I sat there upon the sands, and employed herself in gathering certain marvelous weeds that the sea had tossed up. These weeds fed upon the air, as they had upon the water, remaining fresh upon the girl’s garments, which she decorated with them. She did not address me, but strolled up and down silently. Presently, feeling moved by the assurance of congeniality that one detects so much more quickly in Heaven than on earth, I said to the young girl:—
“Can you tell me the name of the angel—you must have met him—who has but just left me, and with whom I have been conversing?”
“Do you then truly not know?” she asked, shading her eyes with her hand, and looking off in the direction my friend had taken; then back again, with a fine, compassionate surprise at me.
“Indeed I know not.”
“That was the Master who spoke with you.”
“What did you say?”
VIII.
After the experience related in the last chapter, I remained for some time in solitude. Speech seemed incoherence, and effort impossible. I needed a pause to adapt myself to my awe and my happiness; upon neither of which will it be necessary for me to dwell. Yet I think I may be understood if I say that from this hour I found that what we call Heaven had truly begun for me. Now indeed for the first time I may say that I believed without wonder in the life everlasting; since now, for the first time, I had a reason sufficient for the continuance of existence. A force like the cohesion of atoms held me to eternal hope. Brighter than the dawn of friendship upon a heart bereft, more solemn than the sunrise of love itself upon a life that had thought itself unloved, stole on the power of the Presence to which I had been admitted in so surprising, and yet, after all, how natural a way! Henceforth the knowledge that this experience might be renewed for me at any turn of thought or act, would illuminate joy itself, so that “it should have no need of the sun to lighten it.” I recalled these words, as one recalls a familiar quotation repeated for the first time on some foreign locality of which it is descriptive. Now I knew what he meant, who wrote: “The Lamb is the Light thereof.”
When I came to myself, I observed the young girl who had before addressed me still strolling on the shore. She beckoned, and I went to her, with a new meekness in my heart. What will He have me to do? If, by the lips of this young thing, He choose to instruct me, let me glory in the humility with which I will be a learner!