"The Sun! the Sun!" one after another made answer. The Dewdrop was a tear that fell from the sky because the Sun was gone. But, as you have just told us, we are all parts of it--everyone of us are; and we are on our way again to the golden entrance to his Palace. The army of misty globules rose and rose, higher and yet higher. They seemed, too, to get brighter and brighter in the ascent, the Lark rising with them, indeed till his little wings were tired. Then when he felt that he could act as convoy no farther, down he came at one long unpausing dart to the furrow adjoining the wooded dell below, which was now all streaked with fleckered light. He thought (and we shall not quarrel with the fancy) that these patches of light were nothing else than the golden arrows he had seen shot from the bow of the Cherubs--the little Angels of the Dawn--and that they were now lying thick in the green arcade. He just took breath, after the exhaustion and excitement, alike of both body and mind, which his aerial adventure had entailed; and then hastened straight to the home of the Nightingale and Thrush, to tell of the glorious ascent (what the old and learned creatures of the earth would have called the apotheosis) of the Dewdrop on the rose-leaf; its severance into a million fragments; and how these, in the shape of a great army, had marched right within THE SUN'S GOLDEN GATES! [Illustration] _AFTERWORDS._ _An Angel's Whisper._ The Soul--the Spirit of Man--apart from the Great Sun, becomes a teardrop. All is dark to it, when that All-glorious Source of Light and Love is away. Earth's sweetest songs cannot cheer it. But when the morning comes, and the Sun returns, the teardrop becomes a Dewdrop--gleaming like a diamond in that peerless radiance. And at death, when it _seems_ to be dissolved, and has apparently vanished from sight, it is exhaled--not annihilated. It passes upward to the Golden Gates, to be lost in the splendour of THE EVERLASTING LIGHT! [Illustration]