Upon my asking Marie Sauvée what business this might be, she hesitated. “I have become ambitious in Heaven,” she answered slowly. “I shall never be content till I am fit to be sent to the worst woman that can be found--no matter which side of death--I don’t care in what world--I want to be sent to one that nobody else will touch; I think I might know how to save her. It is a tremendous ambition!” she repeated. “Preposterous for the greatest angel there is here! And yet I--_I_ mean to do it.” I was led on in this way by Marie Sauvée, through and out of the city into the western suburbs; we had approached from the east, and had walked a long distance. There did not occur to me, I think, till we had made the circuit of the beautiful town, one thing, which, when I did observe it, struck me as, on the whole, the most impressive that I had noticed. “I have not seen,” I said, stopping suddenly, “I have not seen a poor person in all this city.” “Nor an aged one, have you?” asked Marie Sauvée, smiling. “Now that I think of it,--no. Nor a sick one. Not a beggar. Not a cripple. Not a mourner. Not--and yet what have we here? This building, by which you are leading me, bears a device above the door, the last I should ever have expected to find _here_.” It was an imposing building, of a certain translucent material that had the massiveness of marble, with the delicacy of thin agate illuminated from within. The rear of this building gave upon the open country, with a background of hills, and the vision of the sea which I had crossed. People strolled about the grounds, which had more than the magnificence of Oriental gardens. Music came from the building, and the saunterers, whom I saw, seemed nevertheless not to be idlers, but persons busily employed in various ways--I should have said, under the close direction of others who guided them. The inscription above the door of this building was a word, in a tongue unknown to me, meaning “Hospital,” as I was told. “They are the sick at heart,” said Marie Sauvée, in answer to my look of perplexity, “who are healed there. And they are the sick of soul; those who were most unready for the new life; they whose spiritual being was diseased through inaction, _they_ are the invalids of Heaven. There they are put under treatment, and slowly cured. With some, it takes long. I was there myself when I first came, for a little; it will be a most interesting place for you to visit, by-and-by.” I inquired who were the physicians of this celestial sanitarium. “They who unite the natural love of healing to the highest spiritual development.” “By no means, then, necessarily they who were skilled in the treatment of diseases on earth?” I asked, laughing.