“Have I been dreaming, or do my eyes deceive me?  How can all this be true?  Your hand is sensible to my touch.  I implore you to remain until I speak to you more about the sciences of your world.”

In all my journey I never yielded to persuasion before.  But somehow I consented to spend a season longer of most charming fellowship, talking of the elements in nature, their chemical affinities, and the laws of matter and mind.  Plume was unusually bright in the philosophies, and I gathered from her many truths which had always before been hidden to me.

Finally I became rigid in my determination to leave, for I knew that I could not stay.

“Grant me one request,” she begged.

“Let me hear it.”

“Promise me that you will return.”

“Impossible, impossible!”

The parting that followed was indeed memorable.  Without any further notice I suddenly vanished, but still tarried invisibly in close proximity.

Plume was now left in deep bewilderment, and I could not even conjecture the details of her warring thoughts.  Finally I saw that for which I had tarried.  Plume lifted her wings and flew skyward as beautifully and gracefully as any bird of our earthly air.

CHAPTER XXII.

Heaven.

After my ambition to visit one thousand worlds had been realised, and I was darting toward the confines of our own little Solar System, instinctively I looked out once more over the vast stretches of space.  All around me, at amazing distances, loomed up the millions of spheres which I had not visited by reason of my limited time.  I felt like some one who, after gaining his first thousand dollars, has a wild craving to accumulate ten or one hundred thousand more.

Still I scanned the heavens while deeper longings pervaded my soul.  While in this mood the most unusual vision flashed upon my eyes.  Suddenly I forgot whither I was going and in wild astonishment I drank in the first view of Heaven.  Inwardly I marveled that I had not seen at least a part of it before.

Heaven is fashioned on a transcendently large scale.  It is not a single sphere, but a universal chain of vast and luminous star-groups, scattered harmoniously throughout the infinite regions of space, so that a part of it lies suspended preciously near to our own Solar System.  Heaven is more real and substantial than the suns and planets of the universe, although not one of its numberless parts can be detected by the human eye, or discerned through a telescope.  These luminous orbs that constitute Heaven control the movements of the planets, suns and systems which we call material.  They are whiter than snow and shine with a luster not dazzling, but restful to the eye capable of seeing them.

How this glimpse put to naught all my former crude conceptions of Heaven, and if I found myself unable to describe the wonders of many a dark world which I have visited, how much less could I portray the vastly superior beauties of Heaven which are so far beyond the glory of dark, rugged worlds that I felt an inexpressible desire to take up my abode there at once and to remain forever.