“Why not talk as well as sing? Does not song involve the faculty of speech?--unless you would like to make canaries of us.” “Ye-es. Why, yes.” “There are the visitors at the beautiful Mount of Transfiguration again. Did not they _talk_ with each other and with Christ? Did not John _talk_ with the angel who ‘shewed him those things’?” “And you mean to say--” “I mean to say that if there is such a thing as common sense, you will talk with Roy as you talked with him here,--only not as you talked with him here, because there will be no troubles nor sins, no anxieties nor cares, to talk about; no ugly shades of cross words or little quarrels to be made up; no fearful looking-for of separation.” I laid my head upon her shoulder, and could hardly speak for the comfort that she gave me. “Yes, I believe we shall talk and laugh and joke and play--” “Laugh and joke in heaven?” “Why not?” “But it seems so--so--why, so wicked and irreverent and all that, you know.” Just then Faith, who, mounted out on the kitchen table, was preaching at Phœbe in comical mimicry of Dr. Bland’s choicest intonations, laughed out like the splash of a little wave. The sound came in at the open door, and we stopped to listen till it had rippled away. “There!” said her mother, “put that child, this very minute, with all her little sins forgiven, into one of our dear Lord’s many mansions, and do you suppose that she would be any the less holy or less reverent for a laugh like that? Is he going to check all the sparkle and blossom of life when he takes us to himself? I don’t believe any such thing. There were both sense and Christianity in what somebody wrote on the death of a humorous poet:-- ‘Does nobody laugh there, where he has gone,-- This man of the smile and the jest?’ --provided there was any hope that the poor fellow _had_ gone to heaven; if not, it was bad philosophy and worse religion. Did not David dance before the Lord with all his might? A Bible which is full of happy battle-cries: ‘Rejoice in the Lord! make a joyful noise unto him! Give thanks unto the Lord, for his mercy endureth!’--a Bible which exhausts its splendid wealth of rhetoric to make us understand that the coming life is a life of _joy_, no more threatens to make nuns than mutes of us. I expect that you will hear some of Roy’s very old jokes, see the sparkle in his eye, listen to his laughing voice, lighten up the happy days as gleefully as you may choose; and that--” Faith appeared upon the scene just then, with the interesting information that she had bitten her tongue; so we talked no more. How pleasant--how pleasant this is! I never supposed before that God would let any one laugh in heaven. I wonder if Roy has seen the President. Aunt Winifred says she does not doubt it. She thinks that all the soldiers must have crowded up to meet him, and “O,” she says, “what a sight to see!” VII. May 12th.