the oldest and dearest friend of my last life, who had died before me.  He had been a teacher, a man of the simplest and most guileless life, whose whole energy and delight was given to teaching and loving the young.  The surprising thing about him had always been that he could meet one, after a long silence or a suspension of intercourse, as simply and easily as if one had but left him the day before; and it was just the same here.  There was no effusiveness of greeting—­we just fell at once into the old familiar talk.

“You are just the same,” I said to him, looking at the burly figure, the big, almost clumsy, head, and the irradiating smile.  His great charm had always been an entire unworldliness and absence of ambition.

He smiled at this and said: 

“Yes, I am afraid I am too easy-going.”  He had never cared to talk about himself, and now he said, “Well, yes, I go along in my old prosy way.  It is just like the old schooldays, with half the difficulties gone.  Of course the children are not always good, but that makes it the more amusing; and one can see much more easily what they are thinking of and dreaming about.”

I found myself telling him my adventures, which he heard with the same quiet attention and I was sure that he would never forget a single point—­he never forgot anything in the old days.

“Yes,” he said at the end, “that’s a wonderful story.  You always had the trouble of the adventures, and I had the fun of hearing them.”

He asked me what I was now going to do, and I said that I had not the least idea.

“Oh, that will be all right,” he said.

It was all so comfortable and simple, so obvious indeed, that I laughed to think of the bitter and miserable reveries I had indulged in when he was taken from me, and when the stay of my life seemed gone.  The whole incident seemed to give me back a touch of the serenity which I had lost, and I saw how beautifully this joy of meeting had been planned for me, when I wanted it most.  Presently he said that he must go off for a lesson, and asked me to come with him and see the children.  We went into a big class-room, where some boys and girls were assembling.  Here he was exactly the same as ever; no sentiment, but just a kind of bluff paternal kindness.  The lesson was most informal—­a good deal of questioning and answering; it was a biographical lecture, but devoted, I saw, in a simple way, to tracing the development of the hero’s character.  “What made him do that?” was a constant question.  The answers were most ingenious and extraordinarily lively; but the order was perfect.  At the end he called up two or three children who had shown some impatience or jealousy in the lesson, and said a few half-humorous words to them, with an air of affectionate interest.

“They are jolly little creatures,” he said when they had all gone out.

“Yes,” I said, with a sigh, “I do indeed envy you.  I wish I could be set to something of the kind.”