THE GATES AJAR. BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. “Splendor! Immensity! Eternity! Grand words! Great things! A little definite happiness would be more to the purpose.” MADAME DE GASPARIN BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 1873. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO., In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO., CAMBRIDGE. To my father, whose life, like a perfume from beyond the Gates, penetrates every life which approaches it, the readers of this little book will owe whatever pleasant thing they may find within its pages. E. S. P. ANDOVER, October 22, 1868. THE GATES AJAR. I. One week; only one week to-day, this twenty-first of February. I have been sitting here in the dark and thinking about it, till it seems so horribly long and so horribly short; it has been such a week to live through, and it is such a small part of the weeks that must be lived through, that I could think no longer, but lighted my lamp and opened my desk to find something to do. I was tossing my paper about,--only my own: the packages in the yellow envelopes I have not been quite brave enough to open yet,--when I came across this poor little book in which I used to keep memoranda of the weather, and my lovers, when I was a school-girl. I turned the leaves, smiling to see how many blank pages were left, and took up my pen, and now I am not smiling any more. If it had not come exactly as it did, it seems to me as if I could bear it better. They tell me that it should not have been such a shock. “Your brother had been in the army so long that you should have been prepared for anything. Everybody knows by what a hair a soldier’s life is always hanging,” and a great deal more that I am afraid I have not listened to. I suppose it is all true; but that never makes it any easier. The house feels like a prison. I walk up and down and wonder that I ever called it home. Something is the matter with the sunsets; they come and go, and I do not notice them. Something ails the voices of the children, snowballing down the street; all the music has gone out of them, and they hurt me like knives. The harmless, happy children!--and Roy loved the little children. Why, it seems to me as if the world were spinning around in the light and wind and laughter, and God just stretched down His hand one morning and put it out. It was such a dear, pleasant world to be put out!