The multitudinous shadows were on every side; pressing on the right, crowding on the left; before him and in the rear; close, closer—urging for companionship; shrieking for guidance through the gulf of the vast Unknown; through the trackless No Land which lies between the material and the spiritual world. He felt their silent despairing cry, that they were lost in this horrible void; they clutched at him as he swept past them, and although there was no sound all this reached his spiritual consciousness like the roar of the tempest, or the tumult and crash of falling worlds, so magnified was his understanding of all things. The commotion horrified him; instincts of the plane of life now left behind prompted resentment; he would have fought the impalpable—given physical blows to things of no substance—to shadows. He felt a strange, incongruous sense of mirth as he realized the absurdity of it—was he not a disembodied spirit among a countless throng like unto himself? A wave of pity for himself and all that surging throng swept over him. He was carried rapidly onward, although he realized no volition of his own; darker, darker grew the way; all the accompanying shadows disappeared until there was nothing to stir the deadly silence and gloom; his longing for sound became torture—it was like holding the breath expecting disaster—he felt an agonized desire to scream, and thus break this horrible, waveless void into billows of uproar. This laying off the flesh—and retaining all of the spiritual activity augmented by being set so entirely free from all limitations of the material plane, yet without chart or compass on the unknown spiritual sea, was suggestive of difficulties bordering upon punishment, instead of the unalloyed happiness expected. He grew very weary of this continued progress, with no known end in view; it is the hope of accomplishment which makes all things—even waiting—bearable. He whimsically likened himself to a fly in a sea of ink; he was but a somber atom in a shroud of darkness, just a trifle more dense than his environment. After that which seemed to him ages of time and limitless space—forgetful that beyond the physical life there could exist neither time nor space, as both are of man’s comprehension—the density lightened a trifle; a seeming wall rose somberly before him, a tantalizing suggestion of a means of ingress; and as he looked in fear and amaze a door opened, from which there issued a blinding light, and illumined by its rays he beheld a creature more beautiful than the imagination of man ever conceived.