"Aggie, Aggie," said James Courtenay, who saw his nurse's anxious face, and that she was about to stop his speaking any more, "it is no use to try to stop my telling you all about it. My head has been so strange of late, that I forget everything, and I am afraid of forgetting this dream; so I must tell it now, and you are to write it down, that I may have it to read, if it should slip out of my mind. Jacob Dobbin said,—'You are not now in the right road; but ask Jesus to pardon your sins, and then go and love everybody just as Jesus loved you; and try to make every one happy, and do good morning, noon, and night, and try to scatter some flowers of happiness in every place to which you go; and then you shall be with me in the land where all is bright.' And I thought Jacob pulled the one moss-rose, and gave it to me, and said, 'This is an earthly rose; keep it as long and as carefully as you will, it will fade at last; but our flowers never fade: try, O try, to come to them.' I heard music, Aggie, or something like music, or perhaps like a stream flowing along, and I felt something like the summer breeze upon my cheeks, and Jacob was gone, and there I stood with the rose in my hand.
"Write it down, Aggie," said the invalid, "exactly as I have told you;" and having said this, James Courtenay dropped off into a doze again.
Some days intervened between this reference to what had passed and the next conversation upon the subject, in which James Courtenay told Aggie—who had to listen much against her will—what he thought about this wonderful dream.
"I know the meaning of that dream," said James Courtenay to his nurse. "I do not want any one to explain it to me; I can tell all about it. The meaning is, that I must become a changed boy, or I shall never go to heaven when I die; and all the good things which I have here are not to be compared with those which are to be had there. What Jacob said was, that all these things are fading, and I must seek for what is better than anything here.
"Aggie," said James Courtenay, "you often think I am asleep when I am not; and you think I scarcely have my mind about me yet, when I lie so long quite still, looking away into the blue sky: but I am thinking; I am always thinking, and very often I am praying—asking forgiveness for the past, and hoping that I shall be changed for the future."
"But we can't do much by hoping," said Aggie, "and we can't do anything by ourselves."
"I mean to do more than hope," said James Courtenay; "I mean to try."
"And you mean, I trust, to ask God's Spirit to help you?" said Aggie.
"Yes, every day," said James. "He helped Jacob, and he'll help me; and I hope to be yet where Jacob is now."
"Ay, he helps the poor," said Aggie, "and he'll help the rich. Jacob had his trials, and you'll have yours; and perhaps yours are the hardest, so far as going to heaven is concerned; for the rich have a temptation in every acre of land and in every guinea they have. Our Lord says that ''tis hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.'"