“Come in, Miss Mary! Don’t feel bashful. It’s nobody but your own boys. Here we are. There’s a thing I remember--you used to read it. ‘_For when ye fail_’--you know I never could quote straight--‘_they shall receive you into everlasting habitations_’--Wasn’t that it? Now here. See! Count us! _Not one missing_, do you see? You said you’d have us all here yet--all that died before you did. You used to tell us so. You prayed it, and you lived it, and you did it, and, by His everlasting mercy, here we are. Look us over. Count again. I couldn’t make a speech on earth and I can’t make one in Heaven--but the fellows put me up to it. _Come_ in, Miss Mary! _Dear_ Miss Mary--why, we want to shake hands with you, all around! We want to sit and tell army-stories half the night. We want to have some of the old songs, and--What! Crying, Miss Mary?--_You?_ We never saw you cry in all our lives. Your lip used to tremble. You got pretty white; but you weren’t that kind of woman. Oh, see here! _Crying_ in HEAVEN?”-- X. From this time, the events which I am trying to relate began to assume in fact a much more orderly course; yet in form I scarcely find them more easy to present. Narrative, as has been said of conversation, “is always but a selection,” and in this case the peculiar difficulties of choosing from an immense mass of material that which can be most fitly compressed into the compass allowed me by these few pages, are so great, that I have again and again laid down my task in despair; only to be urged on by my conviction that it is more clearly my duty to speak what may carry comfort to the hearts of some, than to worry because my imperfect manner of expression may offend the heads of others. All I can presume to hope for this record of an experience is, that it may have a passing value to certain of my readers whose anticipations of what they call “the Hereafter” are so vague or so dubious as to be more of a pain than a pleasure to themselves. From the time of my reception into my father’s house, I lost the sense of homelessness which had more or less possessed me since my entrance upon the new life, and felt myself becoming again a member of an organized society, with definite duties as well as assured pleasures before me.