"What the awakened life for which I am waiting will be like, I know not consciously, but something there is within me that does know, and that has a dumb inarticulate knowledge of it, like the memory of a dream which we have not all forgotten, yet cannot all recall. That it will be _Life_, I am sure--a life which though orbing in ampler cycle and vaster sweep than this life, is yet on one and the same plane with it, and in no way separate and distinct. Nay, even now this dream-world would seem to be surrounded and insphered by the waking one, even as 'time is but a parenthesis in eternity;' for there are realities in this unreal existence, flowers and faces, love and poetry, and the morning and evening skies, which have to me no part in this perishable world, but which 'torment me ever with invitations to their own inaccessible home.'" I have transcribed this extract from my earlier diary, not because I think there is anything in it worth preservation, but because I believe it very aptly illustrates the suitability of the punishment meted out to me in hell to my own peculiar temperament. I was one of those who lived only in thought. "The world is a dream," I said, "things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thought of them." Hence to make my punishment a _thought_, to confront me with the memory of my crime and of its consequences, and to leave me thus hell-haunted by the cry of an awakened conscience, was to inflict a torment upon me a thousand-fold more terrible than material pain. To those, however, who think with Heine, that "mental torture is more easily to be endured than physical pain," I have a word to say. When I was in hell, I saw there the souls of men and women whom I had known in life, and I learnt something of the nature of their sufferings. Unlike my own, that punishment was, in many cases, not mental but physical; and to those who are incapable of realizing what agony a thought can bring, let me say that hell has too its bodily punishment, and punishment from which there is no escape. [Illustration] CHAPTER VIII. _MAKE AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY IN HELL, AND MEET WITH AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE._ "The servants said unto Him, Wilt Thou then that we go and gather them up? But He said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. _Let both grow together until the harvest._"--Matt. xiii. 28, 29, 30. I come now to what I think is the strangest part of my story. "When any one dies," I had been told in childhood, "he goes to one or the other of two places--either to hell or to heaven--according to whether he has been a good or bad man," and I recollect being not a little troubled in my childish mind as to what became of the people whose virtues were about equally matched with their vices (as I had even then discovered was not seldom the case), and whose chances between hell and heaven were what we used to call in my schoolboy days (I do not say it irreverently) a "toss-up."