I must say a word, too, of the great and noble friendships which I formed at this period of my existence.  We were not free to make many of these at a time.  Love seems to be the one thing that demands an entire concentration, and though in the world of spirits I became aware that one could be conscious of many of the thoughts of those about me simultaneously, yet the emotion of love, in the earlier stages, is single and exclusive.

I will speak of two only.  There were a young man and a young woman who were much associated with me at that time, whom I will call Philip and Anna.  Philip was one of the most beautiful of all the spirits I ever came near.  His last life upon earth had been a long one, and he had been a teacher.  I used to tell him that I wished I had been under him as a pupil, to which he replied, laughing, that I should have found him very uninteresting.  He said to me once that the way in which he had always distinguished the two kinds of teachers on earth had been by whether they were always anxious to teach new books and new subjects, or went on contentedly with the old.  “The pleasure,” he said, “was in the teaching, in making the thought clear, in tempting the boys to find out what they knew all the time; and the oftener I taught a subject the better I liked it; it was like a big cog-wheel, with a number of little cog-wheels turning with it.  But the men who were always wanting to change their subjects were the men who thought of their own intellectual interest first, and very little of the small interests revolving upon it.”  The charm of Philip was the charm of extreme ingenuousness combined with daring insight.  He never seemed to be shocked or distressed by anything.  He said one day, “It was not the sensual or the timid or the ill-tempered boys who used to make me anxious.  Those were definite faults and brought definite punishment; it was the hard-hearted, virtuous, ambitious, sensible boys, who were good-humoured and respectable and selfish, who bothered me; one wanted to shake them as a terrier shakes a rat—­but there was nothing to get hold of.  They were a credit to themselves and to their parents and to the school; and yet they went downhill with every success.”

Anna was a woman of singularly unselfish and courageous temperament.  She had been, in the course of her last life upon earth, a hospital nurse; and she used to speak gratefully of the long periods when she was nursing some anxious case, when she had interchanged day and night, sleeping when the world was awake, and sitting with a book or needlework by the sick-bed, through the long darkness.  “People used to say to me that it must be so depressing; but those were my happiest hours, as the dark brightened into dawn, when many of the strange mysteries of life and pain and death gave up their secrets to me.  But of course,” she added with a smile, “it was all very dim to me.  I felt the truth rather than saw it; and it is a great joy to me to perceive now what was happening, and how the sad, bewildered hours of pain and misery leave their blessed marks upon the soul, like the tools of the graver on the gem.  If only we could learn to plan a little less and to believe a little more, how much simpler it would all be!”