The longer we live, the stronger grows the wish to live. And why not? When the circle is almost ended, and all the momentum of threescore-and-ten is gained, why not pass the line and enter into second childhood? What more beautiful truth in Nature's I Am, than obedience to this law? I've another fancy on the Big Blue to-night. It is a place for fancies. I remember--a long time ago it seems, and yet I am not so old as Saul's mother--the first knowledge that I had of life. I saw the sun come up one morning out of the sea, and with it there came out of the night of my past a consciousness. I was a soul, and held relations separate from other souls to that risen sun and that sea. From that hour I grew into life. A growth from the Unseen came to me with every day, born I knew not how into my soul. I sent out nothing to people the future. All came to me. Is this true, this faith or fancy that God sends a tidal wave through man, bringing with it from Heaven's ocean fragments set afloat from its shore to lodge in our lives, until there comes an ebb, and then begin our hopes and desires all to tend heavenward, or _elsewhere?_ Have you never felt, do you not now feel, that there is more of yourself _somewhere else_ than there is upon the Earth? I like to think thus, when I see a person ill, or in sorrow, or weighed down with weary griefs. I like to think that that which is ebbing here is flowing and ripening into fitness for the freed soul in that land where there shall be "no more sea." In insanity, does the kind Lord remove _all_ from this world in order to fit up the new life more gloriously? and are those whom most we pity clasped the closest in the Living Arms? It may be,--there is such comfort in possibilities. Will Saul come to-night? I am all alone on the Big Blue. There's not another settled claim for miles away. The August sun drank up the moisture from our corn-fields, took out the blood of our prairie-grasses, and God sent no cooling rains. Why? Skylight was charmful for a while. I had forgotten Saul's assertion that he was a pale shadow of Waubeeneemah, as we forget a dream of our latest sleep. At my home Aunt Carter appeared one day, and said she had "come to spend the afternoon and stay to tea"; and she seated her amplitude of being in Saul's favorite chair, and began to count the stitches in the heel of the twenty-fourth stocking that she assured me "she had knit every stitch of since the night she saw my husband lift me down at the gate just outside the window." Her blue eyes went down deeper and deeper into the bluer yarn her fingers were threading; and after a long pause, during which I had forgotten her presence, and was counting out the hours on the face of the clock which the slow hands must travel over before Saul would be at home, suddenly she looked up and began with,-- "Mrs. Monten!"