‘Is this your house, my little men?’ he asked of the children—­pretty little rosy boys—­who assented; and he leaned with his open hand against the stem of one of the trees, and with a grave smile he nodded down to me, saying—­

’You see now, and hear, and feel for yourself that both the vision and the story were quite true; but come on, my dear, we have further to go.’

And relapsing into silence we had a long ramble through the wood, the same on which I was now looking in the distance.  Every now and then he made me sit down to rest, and he in a musing solemn sort of way would relate some little story, reflecting, even to my childish mind, a strange suspicion of a spiritual meaning, but different from what honest Mrs. Rusk used to expound to me from the Parables, and, somehow, startling in its very vagueness.

Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark mysterious little ‘whipper-snapper’ through the woodland glades.  We came, to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey, pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained steps, the lonely sepulchre in which I had the morning before seen poor mamma laid.  At the sight the fountains of my grief reopened, and I cried bitterly, repeating, ‘Oh! mamma, mamma, little mamma!’ and so went on weeping and calling wildly on the deaf and the silent.  There was a stone bench some ten steps away from the tomb.

‘Sit down beside me, my child,’ said the grave man with the black eyes, very kindly and gently.  ‘Now, what do you see there?’ he asked, pointing horizontally with his stick towards the centre of the opposite structure.

‘Oh, that—­that place where poor mamma is?’

’Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either you or me to see over.  But——­’

Here he mentioned a name which I think must have been Swedenborg, from what I afterwards learnt of his tenets and revelations; I only know that it sounded to me like the name of a magician in a fairy tale; I fancied he lived in the wood which surrounded us, and I began to grow frightened as he proceeded.

’But Swedenborg sees beyond it, over, and through it, and has told me all that concerns us to know.  He says your mamma is not there.’

‘She is taken away!’ I cried, starting up, and with streaming eyes, gazing on the building which, though I stamped my feet in my distraction, I was afraid to approach.  ’Oh, is mamma taken away?  Where is she?  Where have they brought her to?’

I was uttering unconsciously very nearly the question with which Mary, in the grey of that wondrous morning on which she stood by the empty sepulchre, accosted the figure standing near.

’Your mamma is alive but too far away to see or hear us.  Swedenborg, standing here, can see and hear her, and tells me all he sees, just as I told you in the garden about the little boys and the cottage, and the trees and flowers which you could not see.  You believed in when I told you.  So I can tell you now as I did then; and as we are both, I hope, walking on to the same place just as we did to the trees and cottage.  You will surely see with your own eyes how true the description is which I give you.’