"Half of our work, and more, is on earth," she made answer. "It was to tell you of that that I pointed out my poet-friend, the dreamer of dreams, to you. Himself a poet, he was the son of a poet, who had lived to see all else he loved on earth pass away before him; and when this boy, his darling hope and only companion, was also taken, the old man was left lonely, desolate and infirm. But not so lonely as one might imagine, for his boy seldom leaves him, and the work which God has set apart for the poet-son, and which is to him the resting-work of heaven, is to be with his father in all sorrow, to minister to him in all pain, and to be with him in every wakeful or weary moment, his unseen comforter and friend." I was interested in what she related, for I remembered that when I was sitting one evening with the poet-father, he had told me that, for all his loneliness, he was never alone. "No, I am never lonely," he said, "although you will perhaps think what I am going to tell you is but an old mans' fancy. A night or two after my dear boy died, I was thinking of my dead youth, and of my dead wife, of my dead friends and my dead children, until it seemed to me as if I, too, ought long since to have been buried, for I was lingering on (like a spectral moon when the sun is high) the living ghost of a vanished past. The generation had departed which I knew, and the one which was growing up around me was too busy listening to the songs of its own singers to give ear to mine. As the thought of my loneliness, my loveless life, and my boy's newly-made grave, away out in the dreary cemetery, came over me, I did that which was cowardly and faithless, and dropped my head upon my hands and wept. Then it was that there came a touch upon my arm, and a voice in my ear, and though I knew none else was in the room, I was not afraid, but answered without looking up: 'Who is it?' "'It is only I, dear father,' the voice replied, 'only your boy. You must not be unhappy about me, for though I have greatly sinned, yet I have been greatly forgiven, and am perfectly, peacefully happy.' "My son then went on to tell me," the old man continued, "that for me there was to be no more loneliness, for that in all my sleepless nights and sorrowful days, he would be with me ever and always, my constant companion and comforter, until for me too the time shall come when, "'Midnight waking, twilight weeping, heavy noontide--all are done.'" * * * * *