After a year of mourning, during which the wisest of laws were framed for the control of the mines and the factories and all the sources of wealth, and land and water were made all men’s and no man’s property, and the children were trained to believe in the revealed religion of love as the living word of God in the heart of man, then the Princess announced her marriage with her Minister and adviser, Peter, the son of a poor man, and they lived happily with their people, and all men loved and praised Peter, and Peter praised and worshiped the Princess Elizabeth. They lived to a ripe old age, gathering blessings as they went, and they had sixteen children.
But Simon returned to his own country and his village, taking with him the two boxes. Out of the one he never took another piece of gold, and into the other he never looked until he was at peace with himself and knew that he could gaze upon his soul undismayed. When he looked into it he saw Peter and the Princess and their children, for all his love was with them. Then he went out upon the road, and beneath an enormous oak tree he found the lean, brown old man with his great book on his knees, reading aloud. He laid the boxes at his feet and bowed to him and said:
“It is well.”
The old man bowed, and, turning a page in his book, he read:
“It is well with the world. Man frets his peace in his little hour on this earth, whereof he is and whereto he returns; but it is well with the world.”
The curtain fell. The little theater disappeared, and all that he had seen and heard in it buzzed in Old Mole’s head, and the colors whirled and a flood of emotion surged through his body, and the spell of it all was upon him. He shifted uneasily upon the sack on which he was seated, and there came a rent in it. Inside it was a corpse, and, when he peered at it in horror, he knew that it was himself.
The enchantment broke, and, shivering and very cold, he fell back into the world of familiar things, the room in the lodging house, with the fire out, and above his head, in the first floor front, lay Matilda, sleeping. He went up to her, and she lay with her hair back over her pillow and her hand under her cheek, and he said:
“I will live to serve you. For my life is nothing except it go to sustain the wonder of yours.”
Old Mole was much astonished at this effort of his imagination, and later on wrote and rewrote it many times, but what he wrote was no more than the pale echo of what he had heard, the faded copy of what he had seen. When he came to analyze and diagnose his condition he concluded that the vivid impressions produced on his unexercised receptive mind had induced a kind of self-hypnotism in which he had been delivered up to the power of dreams subject peculiarly to the direction of his logical faculty. He could not remember having eaten anything that would account for it.