When we had sat together for a time, the boy made haste to depart.  We three went with him to the edge of the wood, where a road passed up among the oaks.  The three embraced and kissed and said many loving words; and then to ease the anxieties of the two, I said that I would myself set the boy forward on his way, and see him well bestowed.  They thanked me, and we went together into the wood, the two lovingly waving and beckoning, and the boy stepping blithely by my side.

I asked him whether he was not sorry to go and leave the quiet place and the pair that loved him.  He smiled and said that he knew he was not leaving them at all, and that he was sure that they would soon follow; and that for himself the time had come to know more of the place.  I learned from him that his last life had been an unhappy one, in a crowded street and a slovenly home, with much evil of talk and act about him; he had hated it all, he said, but for a little sister that he had loved, who had kissed and clasped him, weeping, when he lay dying of a miserable disease.  He said that he thought he should find her, which made part of his joy of going; that for a long while there had come to him a sense of her remembrance and love; and that he had once sent his thought back to earth to find her, and she was in much grief and care; and that then all these messages had at once ceased, and he knew that she had left the body.  He was a merry boy, full of delight and laughter, and we went very cheerfully together through the sunlit wood, with its green glades and open spaces, which seemed all full of life and happiness, creatures living together in goodwill and comfort.  I saw in this journey that all things that ever lived a conscious life in one of the innumerable worlds had a place and life of their own, and a time of refreshment like myself.  What I could not discern was whether there was any interchange of lives, whether the soul of the tree could become an animal, or the animal progress to be a man.  It seemed to me that it was not so, but that each had a separate life of its own.  But I saw how foolish was the fancy that I had pursued in old days, that there was a central reservoir of life, into which at death all little lives were merged; I was yet to learn how strangely all life was knit together, but now I saw that individuality was a real and separate thing, which could not be broken or lost, and that all things that had ever enjoyed a consciousness of the privilege of separate life had a true dignity and worth of existence; and that it was only the body that had made hostility necessary; that though the body could prey upon the bodies of animal and plant, yet that no soul could devour or incorporate any other soul.  But as yet the merging of soul in soul through love was unseen and indeed unsuspected by me.