The interpretation of dreams as a direct intercourse with the spiritual world is not usual in folk-lore; the people hardly see the need of placing the veil of sleep between mortal eyes and ghostly appearances. In a Bulgarian song, however, a sleeping girl speaks with her dead mother. Militza goes down into the little garden where the white and red roses are in bloom. She is weary, and she is soon asleep. A small fine rain begins to fall, the wind rustles in the leaves; Militza sighs, and having sighed, she awakes. Then she upbraids the rain and the wind: "Whistle no more, O wind; thou, O rain, descend no more; for in my dreams I found my mother. Rain, may thy fount be dried; mayst thou be for ever silent, O wind: ye have taken me from the counsel my mother gave me." The few lines thus baldly summarized make up, as it seems to me, a little masterpiece of delicate conception and light workmanship: one which would surprise us from the lips of a letterless poet, were there not proof that no touch is so light and so sure as that of the artificer untaught in our own sense--the man or the woman who produces the intricate filigree, the highly wrought silver, the wood carving, the embroidery, the lace, the knitted wool rivalling the spider's web, the shawl with whose weft and woof a human life is interwoven. I have only once come upon the case of a father who returns to take care of his offspring. Mr Chu, a worthy Chinese gentleman, revisited this earth as a disembodied spirit to guard and teach his little boy Wei. When Wei reached the age of twenty-two, and took his doctor's degree, his father, Mr Chu, finally vanished. As a general rule, the Chinese consider the sight of his former surroundings to be the worst penalty that can befall a soul. Mr Herbert Giles, in his fascinating work on the Liao-Chai of P'u Sing-Ling, gives a full account of the terrible See-one's-home terrace as represented in the fifth court of Purgatory in the Taoist Temples. Good souls, or even those who have done partly good and partly evil, will never stand thereon. The souls of the wicked only see their homes as if they were near them: they see their last wishes disregarded, everything upside down, their substance squandered, the husband prepares to take a new wife, strangers possess the old estate, in their misery the dead man's family curse him, his children become corrupt, lands are gone, the house is burnt, the wife sees her husband tortured, the husband sees his wife stricken down with mortal disease; friends forget: "some perhaps for the sake of bygone times may stroke the coffin and let fall a tear, departing with a cold smile." In the West, this gloomy creed is perhaps hinted at in the French proverb, "Les morts sont bien mort." But Western thought at its best, at its highest, imagines differently. It imagines that the most gracious privilege of immortal spirits is that of beholding those beloved of them in mortal life--