In after years when he remembered the enchanting dreams of his boyhood, instead of sighing after them as something gone for ever, he would say to himself, “What matter they are gone? In the heavenly kingdom my own mother is waiting me, fairer and stronger and real. I imagined the elves; God imagined my mother.” The unconscious magician of the whole mystery, who had seemed to the boy to be spinning his very brain into dreams, rose, and, drawing near the bed, as if to finish the ruthless destruction, and with her long witch-broom sweep down the very cobwebs of his airy phantasy, said, “Is ye waukin’, Cosmo my bairn?” “Ay am I,” answered Cosmo, with a faint pang, and a strange sense of loss: when should he dream its like again! “Soon, soon, Cosmo,” he might have heard, could he have interpreted the telephonic signals from the depths of his own being; “wherever the creative pneuma can enter, there it enters, and no door stands so wide to it as that of the obedient heart.” “Weel, ye maun hae yer supper, an’ syne ye maun say yer prayers, an’ hae dune wi’ Tyseday, an’ gang on til’ Wudens-day.” “I’m nae wantin’ ony supper, thank ye,” said the boy. “Ye maun hae something, my bonny man; for them ’at aits ower little, as weel ’s them ’at aits ower muckle, the night-mear rides--an’ she’s a fearsome horse. Ye can never win upo’ the back o’ her, for as guid a rider as ye’re weel kent to be, my bairn. Sae wull ye hae a drappy parritch an’ ream? or wad ye prefar a sup of fine gruel, sic as yer mother used to like weel frae my han’, whan it sae happent I was i’ the hoose?” The offer seemed to the boy to bring him a little nearer the mother whose memory he worshipped, and on the point of saying, for the sake of saving her trouble, that he would have the porridge, he chose the gruel. He watched from his nest the whole process of its making. It took a time of its own, for one of the secrets of good gruel is a long acquaintance with the fire.--Many a time the picture of that room returned to him in far different circumstances, like a dream of quiet and self-sustained delight--though his one companion was an aged woman.