'I have been taught many things,' said the little Pilgrim, humbly. 'I have been taken back to the dear earth, where I saw the judgment-seat, and the pleaders who spoke, and the man who was the judge, and how each is judge for himself.' 'You have seen the place of hope,' said her guide, 'where the Father is and the Son, and where no man is left to his own ways. But there is another country, where there is no voice either from God or from good spirits, and where those who have refused are left to do as seems good in their own eyes.' 'I have read,' said the little Pilgrim, with a sob, 'of one who went from city to city and found no rest.' Her guide bowed his head very gravely in assent. 'They go from place to place,' he said, 'if haply they might find one in which it is possible to live. Whether it is order or whether it is license, it is according to their own will. They try all things, ever looking for something which the soul may endure. And new cities are founded from time to time, and a new endeavor ever and ever to live, only to live. For even when happiness fails and content, and work is vanity and effort is naught, it is something if a man can but endure to live.' The little Pilgrim looked at him with wistful eyes, for what he said was beyond her understanding. 'For us,' she said, 'life is nothing but joy. Oh, brother, is there then condemnation?' 'It is no condemnation; it is what they have chosen,--it is to follow their own way. There is no longer any one to interfere. The pleaders are all silent; there is no voice in the heart. The Father hinders them not, nor helps them, but leaves them.' He shivered as if with cold; and the little Pilgrim felt that there breathed from the depths of darkness at their feet an icy wind which touched her hands and feet and chilled her heart. She shivered too, and drew close to the rock for shelter, and gazed at the awful cliffs rising out of the gloom, and the paths that disappeared at her feet, leading down, down into that abyss; and her heart failed within her to think that below there were souls that suffered, and that the Father and the Son were not there. He, the All-loving, the All-present,--how could it be that He was not there? 'It is a mystery,' said the man who was her guide, and who answered to her thought. 'When I set my foot upon this blessed land I knew that there, even there, He is. But in that country His face is hidden, and even to name His name is anguish,--for then only do men understand what has befallen them, who can say that name no more.' 'That is death indeed,' she cried; and the wind came up silent with a wild breath that was more awful than the shriek of a storm; for it was like the stifled utterances of all those miserable ones who have no voice to call upon God, and know not where He is nor how to pronounce His name.