“Yes,” said the Earl, “so long as there _were_ any others needing help. But, given ages and ages more, surely all created reasons would at length reach the same dead level of _satiety_. And _then_ what is there to look forward to?” “I know that weary feeling,” said the young Doctor. “I have gone through it all, more than once. Now let me tell you how I have put it to myself. I have imagined a little child, playing with toys on his nursery-floor, and yet able to _reason_, and to look on, thirty years ahead. Might he not say to himself ‘By that time I shall have had enough of bricks and ninepins. How weary Life will be!’ Yet, if we look forward through those thirty years, we find him a great statesman, full of interests and joys far more intense than his baby-life could give—joys wholly inconceivable to his baby-mind—joys such as no baby-language could in the faintest degree describe. Now, may not our life, a million years hence, have the same relation, to our life now, that the man’s life has to the child’s? And, just as one might try, all in vain, to express to that child, in the language of bricks and ninepins, the meaning of ‘politics,’ so perhaps all those descriptions of Heaven, with its music, and its feasts, and its streets of gold, may be only attempts to describe, in _our_ words, things for which we _really_ have no words at all. Don’t you think that, in _your_ picture of another life, you are in fact transplanting that child into political life, without making any allowance for his growing up?” “I think I understand you,” said the Earl. “The music of Heaven _may_ be something beyond our powers of thought. Yet the music of Earth is sweet! Muriel, my child, sing us something before we go to bed!” “Do,” said Arthur, as he rose and lit the candles on the cottage-piano, lately banished from the drawing-room to make room for a ‘semi-grand.’ “There is a song here, that I have never heard you sing. ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart!’” he read from the page he had spread open before her. “And our little life here,” the Earl went on, “is, to that grand time, like a child’s summer-day! One gets tired as night draws on,” he added, with a touch of sadness in his voice, “and one gets to long for bed! For those welcome words ‘Come, child, ’tis bed-time!’” CHAPTER XVII. TO THE RESCUE! “It _isn’t_ bed-time!” said a sleepy little voice. “The owls hasn’t gone to bed, and I s’a’n’t go to seep wizout oo sings to me!” “Oh, Bruno!” cried Sylvie. “Don’t you know the owls have only just got up? But the _frogs_ have gone to bed, ages ago.” “Well, _I_ aren’t a frog,” said Bruno. “What shall I sing?” said Sylvie, skilfully avoiding the argument.