And thus we came ourselves to a new place, though I took but little note of all we passed, for my mind was bent inward upon itself and upon Cynthia. The place was a great solid stone building, in many courts, with fine tree-shaded fields all about; a school, it seemed to me, with boys and girls going in and out, playing games together. Amroth told me that children were bestowed here who had been of naturally fine and frank dispositions, but who had lived their life on earth under foul and cramped conditions, by which they had been fretted rather than tainted. It seemed a very happy and busy place. Amroth took me into a great room that seemed a sort of library or common-room. There was no one there, and I was glad to sit and rest; when suddenly the door opened, and a man came in with outstretched hands and a smile of welcome. I looked up, and it was none but the oldest and dearest friend of my last life, who had died before me. He had been a teacher, a man of the simplest and most guileless life, whose whole energy and delight was given to teaching and loving the young. The surprising thing about him had always been that he could meet one, after a long silence or a suspension of intercourse, as simply and easily as if one had but left him the day before; and it was just the same here. There was no effusiveness of greeting--we just fell at once into the old familiar talk. "You are just the same," I said to him, looking at the burly figure, the big, almost clumsy, head, and the irradiating smile. His great charm had always been an entire unworldliness and absence of ambition. He smiled at this and said: "Yes, I am afraid I am too easy-going." He had never cared to talk about himself, and now he said, "Well, yes, I go along in my old prosy way. It is just like the old schooldays, with half the difficulties gone. Of course the children are not always good, but that makes it the more amusing; and one can see much more easily what they are thinking of and dreaming about." I found myself telling him my adventures, which he heard with the same quiet attention and I was sure that he would never forget a single point--he never forgot anything in the old days. "Yes," he said at the end, "that's a wonderful story. You always had the trouble of the adventures, and I had the fun of hearing them." He asked me what I was now going to do, and I said that I had not the least idea. "Oh, that will be all right," he said.