I think now--nay, I am sure--that I know who that child was. It was my brother James John, the eldest of the family, who had died before I was born, and whom, in this world, therefore, I had never seen. I have little left to tell of my death, for nothing else occurred of any moment, and I am resolved to confine myself strictly to facts. I remember that immediately after I had seen my mother, and while I was wondering who the child she held by the hand could be, there came over me a strange and sudden sense of loss--of physical loss, I think it was, as though some life-element had gone out from me. Of pain there was none, nor was I disturbed by any mental anxiety. I recollect only an ethereal lightness of limb, and a sense of soul-emancipation and peace--a sense of soul-emancipation such as one might feel were he to awaken on a sunny morning to find that all sorrow and sin were gone from the world for ever; a peace ample and restful as the hallowed hush and awe of summer twilight, without the twilight's tender pain. Then I seemed to be sinking slowly and steadily through still depths of sun-steeped, light-filled waters that sang in my ears with a sound like a sweet-sad sobbing and soaring of music, and through which there swam up to me, in watered vistas of light, scenes of sunny seas and shining shores where smiling isles stretched league beyond league afar. And so life ebbed and ebbed away, until at last there came a time--the moment of death, I believe--when the outward and deathward setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept shoreward and lifeward again on the inward-setting tide of that larger life into which I had died. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER V. _IS OF AN EXPLANATORY NATURE ONLY._ When the first rough draft of this diary was lying on my study table, there called to see me, at a time when I chanced to be out, a certain novelist who is an old and intimate friend of mine. He was shown into the study to await my coming, and, on my return, I found him amusing himself with these papers. Of the reality of my death-experiences (which he persistently refused to regard as other than dreams) I had never been able to convince him, and I was not surprised therefore when, after the conversation turned upon the work each of us had in hand, he referred to my booklet in his usual sceptical tone. "My dear fellow," he said, laying one hand upon the offending manuscript, "I haven't the slightest intention of disputing the truth of your statements, or of denying that your diary has a certain unwholesome interest of its own, but seriously, I don't think fiction is altogether in your line." "Nor satire in yours," I replied; "but what have you to say against the thing now?"