longings and ideals; even the body had been transformed into something more like what the soul of their far past had been, subtle, buoyant, sublimated. Still it dragged the spirit down, whenever the limits of corporeal life became too apparent. Many a long generation of fiery self-disciplined work upon their constitutions would it take even this marvellous people to etherealise their bodies so far as to make them fit companions of their souls. Amiralno had not the vital energy to bear up against the conditions that harassed their still hybrid system. He had no desire to stay and see the slow evolution of a body that would pace with the soul through infinity. Better to have release and a new and untrammelled career even if the form he should take was unknown to him. It was the nature of all energy to change, and the higher in the scale it rose, the nimbler it became. But in order to rise it had to be yoked for a time with a lower form, which it used as medium and leverage, leaving it as soon as it had accomplished its due development. All things tended to rise above themselves; and it was the greatest of disasters, the very reversal of nature, if ever they should fall back, as they often did. What we call death was but the unyoking of a higher energy from a lower, which it had temporarily made its comrade and medium. It was no misfortune or degradation, but a step higher in enfranchisement. The animate resisted this step, because one member in the lifelong partnership refused to descend into a grosser transformation again. In the human, the nobler the thought-energy, the higher it strove to raise itself before the inevitable divorce from its lower medium and yoke-fellow. But when the time of severance approached, it mastered the reluctance of the lower, and yearned to be set free. And little wonder that the lower resisted; for back it had to fall in the cosmic order, and begin again its slow progress upward from grade to grade; first into the clutches of myriads of microscopic disintegrators of its tissues that would transform it into food for plant-life, and then by weary stages upwards through vegetable and animal tissue, perchance into the sustenance of thought again.