I do not know how it was, but I did not wholly trust our host.  His mind was hidden from me; and indeed I began to have a sense, not of evil, indeed, or of oppression, but a feeling that it was not the place appointed for me, but only where my business was to lie for a season.  A group of people came up to us and welcomed my companion with great cheerfulness, and she was soon absorbed in talk.

X

Now before I come to tell this next part of my story, there are several things which seem in want of explanation.  I speak of people as looking old and young, and of there being relations between them such as fatherly and motherly, son-like and lover-like.  It bewildered me at first, but I came to guess at the truth.  It would seem that in the further world spirits do preserve for a long time the characteristics of the age at which they last left the earth; but I saw no very young children anywhere at first, though I came afterwards to know what befell them.  It seemed to me that, in the first place I visited, the only spirits I saw were of those who had been able to make a deliberate choice of how they would live in the world and which kind of desires they would serve; it is very hard to say when this choice takes place in the world below, but I came to believe that, early or late, there does come a time when there is an opening out of two paths before each human soul, and when it realises that a choice must be made.  Sometimes this is made early in life; but sometimes a soul drifts on, guileless in a sense, though its life may be evil and purposeless, not looking backwards or forwards, but simply acting as its nature bids it act.  What it is that decides the awakening of the will I hardly know; it is all a secret growth, I think; but the older that the spirit is, in the sense of spiritual experience, the earlier in mortal life that choice is made; and this is only another proof of one of the things which Amroth showed me, that it is, after all, imagination which really makes the difference between souls, and not intellect or shrewdness or energy; all the real things of life—­sympathy, the power of entering into fine relations, however simple they may be, with others, loyalty, patience, devotion, goodness—­seem to grow out of this power of imagination; and the reason why the souls of whom I am going to speak were so content to dwell where they were, was simply that they had no imagination beyond, but dwelt happily among the delights which upon earth are represented by sound and colour and scent and comeliness and comfort.  This was a perpetual surprise to me, because I saw in these fine creatures such a faculty of delicate perception, that I could not help believing again and again that their emotions were as deep and varied too; but I found little by little, that they were all bent, not on loving, and therefore on giving themselves away to what they loved, but in gathering in perceptions and sensations, and