I was telling you that as I lay a-dying, I found myself endeavouring to find fitting words to describe my sensations. At this point, however, the train of my thoughts was disturbed--and I recollect a slight reawakening of my old characteristic irritability at the interruption--by the entrance of a sister who had come from a distance to see me. I remember slightly lifting my head to speak to her, and then glancing round the room to see if all were present. Yes, close beside me, and with his head bowed over his hands, sat my father, and round about the bed were gathered the remainder of the family. Nor were these all, for standing among them were three other figures--that of my brother Fred, whose grave as yet was hardly green, and of my mother and my little sister Comfort, both of whom had died when I was a child. If my conviction that I have indeed been dead be a delusion,--as I doubt not many of my readers will think,--is it not strange, I would ask, that these faces should have been with me at the end? Had there been any conjecture in my mind as to the probability of my meeting with my lost ones, I could readily believe that what I saw was the creation of my own brain. But there had been no such conjecture, for death had taken me, as I have already explained, entirely unawares, and no thought of the dead had as much as occurred to me. Their presence, however, so far from causing me any surprise, seemed perfectly natural, for the fact that they were dead did not dawn upon my consciousness. This, I am ready to allow, strongly supports the theory that these experiences may be nothing more than dreams, for in dreams it not seldom happens that we re-live the past, and hold converse with our departed ones, all oblivious of the death which has come between us. It _may_ be so, I admit, but in my heart of hearts I cannot think it; for if all that I have to tell be but a dream, then does it seem to me the strangest dream ever dreamed by man. Moreover, with these three figures was a fourth--a figure which at first had escaped my notice; and it is the presence of this figure in the room which is to me most unaccountable. My mother, when I first saw her, was standing at the foot of the bed, with my dead brother and sister looking over her shoulder, but at the sight of my father's grief, she went gently round to where he was sitting, and with a caress of infinite pity stooped down as if to whisper in his ear. It was then that I saw for the first time that she held by the hand a little child--a little child whom I had never seen before, but across whose face, as he looked up at me, there flitted the phantom of a resemblance I could not catch. I remember that even then, brain-benumbed and dying as I was, I wondered who that little child could be; but there dawned upon me no shadowy suspicion of the truth, and I passed away with that wonder unremoved.