"Only such as comes through growth," answered the girl.
"Shall I be just as I am when I have passed into the great future?" he asked.
"You will be the same," answered the girl, "only more abundantly yourself. We are all our life looking for ourselves," continued the girl, "and few, if any, find themselves until they die."
"I don't understand," said the man. "I know the Lord is speaking through you, for you are uttering truths so great that at the utterance they seem mysteries. Explain as the teacher explains to the child she is trying to teach."
"I mean," answered the girl, "that death is an enlightenment and a discovery. It will give us revelations of ourselves; for never do we find Him save as we find Him in His, and we are His. You will not know who and what you are until you get far enough ahead, my master, to look back upon yourself. We must go up and go on a long way before we know what we are now."
Here the conversation paused for a while and nothing disturbed the profound silence but the roar of the rapids whose ceaseless sound swelled and sank in the silence like the waves of the sea. At length the man said, "Have you thought of the land ahead? Is it real? And where is it, and what the life lived there?"
"Why do you ask me such questions," answered the girl, "when you know that I have thought only as you have taught me to think, am but repeating the faith I learned from your lips? Surely, there is a land ahead, or rather many lands,—lands and seas and blessed islands in the seas where the blessed live; and loves and lovers and homes exquisitely and endlessly peaceful are there; and men who have grown nobler than they were here; and women, far sweeter than their short life here might make them, live and love in the lands ahead."
The girl spoke low but earnestly, and her words sounded on the silent air like softly-breathed music, so much did her sweet self possess her words. And the man listened as men listen to music when it comes softly and sweetly to their ears.
"Mary," said the man, "you make the life ahead seem so sweet that I shrink from entering it, lest by so doing I escape the punishment for my sin I would fain inflict upon myself."
"Oh, master!" exclaimed the girl, "you do mistake; for though I do believe all I have said and would trust myself to the far future as young eagles trust themselves to the warm air when they have grown equal to the joy of flight, yet the life of this earth is sweet, so sweet when the heart is satisfied that one might fear to exchange it for another as one fears to part with what fully satisfies, even though the promise of more abundant things is sure as God. It is sweet to breathe the airs of the earth as health receives them. 'Tis sweet to live and love and serve in loving and find your happiness in giving it. 'Tis sweet to teach and guide men up and on to wider knowledge and nobler living,—to make them gentler and finer in their thoughts and happier-hearted; and oh, my master, 'tis sweet to live with one you love; be unto him a new life daily, and see him grow in your growth, matching it, and so go on in that perfect companionship that the future may give to us as the highest fortune, and, having given, has given its best and all."