When sunthin’ made me look up, Faith wuz bendin’ forward lookin’ out of the winder, though she couldn’t see anyone that wuz passin’ on account of the ruff, and I see a look that I never see before on any face, it wuz all rousted up, illuminated, glad, triumphant, sad, glowin’, blessed, and everything else.
And I said, “What is it, Faith, what do you see?”
Sez she, “I don’t know.”
And I said then, “What do you think it is?”
And she sez, “Cousin Samantha, do you think that those who are far away ever return to the hearts that are mourning for them? Is there any way that souls can meet while the bodies are far apart?”
“Why yes,” sez I, “I have always thought so, I have always thought they had some way of tellin’ us they wuz nigh without usin’ language we know anything about. Many is the time I’ve expected visitors that I hadn’t seen or hearn from in some time, and sure enough 154 they’d come jest as I seemed to think they would. And letters! how many a time all of a sudden I would most know I wuz goin’ to git a letter from somebody, and sure enough when Josiah would go to the post office he’d bring it back with him. How them folks hundreds of milds away managed to let me know they wuz thinkin’ of me on paper, or how I knew these friends wuz approachin’ onbeknown to me, I don’t know nor Josiah don’t.
“There wuzn’t no U. S. stamp on these messages, nor earthly hands didn’t bring the tidin’s of these visitors. No the post-masters and messengers on that mysterious Route keep perfect silence as to where they be, or who they be. But they are at work all the same, though who they work for, or how they work, how can we tell? The strange rays of light that flash through the darkness of dense bodies makin’ visible what has been onseen since the creation, hasn’t discovered these highways yet, mebby they will. The strange new air route messages that travel acrost the stormy Atlantic may run right acrost these mysterious highways,” and for a minute my mind follered off on them strange, strange tracks, Marconi roads lighted by X-rays and leadin’ who knows where. 155
When my mind kinder come back agin to what we wuz talkin’ about I resoomed, “And if this happens to us as it duz time and agin in regard to friends and well wishers, how much more it is likely to be true of those we love and who love us. This strange knowledge and fore-warnin’ is not material, it is independent of the body or any workin’s of the mind that we understand, and how do we know how fur reachin’ and universal that law is if our eyes wuz not held so we could discern it? If these fine senses wuz not so unused, and as you may say bed-rid by disuse, how do we know how truly near to us may be those who in our blindness we say are fur away, how do we know but their spiritual self, their real self, may be nearer to us than our neighbors in the flesh, and those who sit by our firesides, though our mortal eyes may not see them, and oceans and seas may divide us and mebby the Deepest River. What do we know about the onseen roads that lay all about us, leadin’ from Loontown and Jonesville and from one continent to the other, and mebby up through the clear fields of Light? What do we know about them still mysterious streets windin’ mebby from our home and hearts to Thomas Jefferson’s, and so on, mebby 156 from star to star? And what do we know of the travelers that go up and down on ’em and outward and homeward? These roads don’t need any surveyor to lay ’em out, or path-master to clear ’em of snow and dirt, no weeds grow up by the wayside, nor dirt lays in the track.
“No, clear and broad and unobstructed the luminous pathways may lay all round us onknown to us. Noiseless chariots, swifter than our imaginations can grasp now, may cleave these star routes, connecting one land to another, and mebby jinin’ immense distances to our planet, as easy as we can hitch up and go to Jonesville.
“We don’t see these noiseless conveyances, lighter and swifter than thought, nor the forms they waft to us from afar. We can’t hear their voices, but our soul listens! We feel their nearness! For a blessed moment we are thrilled with the bliss of their presence, their full comprehension of pity and love.