The words disquieted my sisters, who were afraid of returning delirium. They enjoined upon me absolute silence on the plea of my great weakness. So I lay upon my couch, looking alternately out of the two windows of my room. One of them opened upon the inner courtyard with its little fountain of water, as beautiful to my eyes as if it had been a great column of crystal. From the other I saw the summit of the Mount of Olives, beyond which lay the Holy City, concealed as heaven is concealed from us by the intervening heights of our earthly passions. Mary sat near me engaged on some fine needlework; Martha at a little table close by, poring over a beautiful golden-clasped parchment of the Psalms of David. They occasionally lifted their eyes with watchful interest to my face. It was a soothing pleasure to contemplate these lovely women. There was a soft, pure, heavenly atmosphere about them, which reminded me of the heaven I had left; and I understood the words of the Psalmist, that man was created only a little lower than the angels. “Where is Jesus, our benefactor?” I inquired, breaking through their injunction to keep silence. “Gone into Jerusalem,” was the reply. “If our good father was here,” said I, “he would tell us what great change in the world of spirits was coming next; for every movement of Jesus on earth is significative of wonderful things going on in the sphere above us. But alas! from this earthly point of view, all is darkness!” The startled expression of my sisters’ faces showed that they thought my mind was wandering. They only replied by putting their fingers warningly upon their lips. So I shut my eyes and addressed myself to sleep again; but pictures from that museum of Art which memory builds for us all, came floating before me. Mary standing silent and downcast at the mouth of the deserted cave; the Son of the Desert, the zebra of my vision, wearing in his wild life the ring which Martha had given him; Ethopus parting with his treasure to rescue his brother; the haughty stare of the guests of Hortensius in the Hall of Apollo; Helena, the beautiful, leaning against the emerald tree and clapping her hands at the drunken Bacchus; Mary Magdalen toiling up the hill under the terrible load, and comforted by invisible spirits; the great snow-fields and ice-mountains of the spiritually dead, whom I felt but did not see; all these things and many more passed and repassed before my mind’s eye, until, lulled as if by the ceaseless patter of rain, I fell a second time into a deep slumber. I was thoroughly restored when I awoke the next morning. I immediately repeated the Lord’s Prayer after my father’s example; and entered, upon the first page of the book of my new life, a firm resolution to prepare my soul by faith and obedience for an eternal home in the heaven I had visited, but for which I was yet unfit.