“The Hereafter?” said the girl, and she lifted her eyes lovingly to the face of the man.  “The Hereafter is the same as Here, only larger; as things grown are larger than things ungrown.  The Future is to the Present what the river is to the stream, what the stream is to the fountain,—­it is the flowing out and the flowing on,—­the widening and the deepening of what is.”

“Is there no gap, no breakage, no chasm or gulf between the Here and the Hereafter?” asked the man.

“No,” said the girl, “there is no gap, nor chasm, nor gulf, but continuity of progress and perfect sequence.  The connections between the Known and the Unknown are perfect.  The one does not end and the other begin.  Time is the beginning of eternity; and the brief time that men call a day is only a fraction of endlessness.”

“There is no end to life, then?” queried the man.

“End to life!” exclaimed the girl.  “How can life end?  Life changes its form, its embodiment, the location of its residence; but life is the breath of God and when once breathed into the universe and it has taken form and made for itself expression, who may annihilate it?  Who may take it out of existence?  No, master, there is no end to life.”

“It is a sublime faith,” said the man, “and I have proclaimed it unto many; but few have been great enough to receive the doctrine as a verity.  In theory they have received it; but their superstition has robbed them of its mighty consolations.  But if we do not die, but only pass forward as men go out of a city’s gate along a road that has no end, what fate befalls them?  Does a change of nature come to them?”

“Only such as comes through growth,” answered the girl.

“Shall I be just as I am when I have passed into the great future?” he asked.

“You will be the same,” answered the girl, “only more abundantly yourself.  We are all our life looking for ourselves,” continued the girl, “and few, if any, find themselves until they die.”

“I don’t understand,” said the man.  “I know the Lord is speaking through you, for you are uttering truths so great that at the utterance they seem mysteries.  Explain as the teacher explains to the child she is trying to teach.”

“I mean,” answered the girl, “that death is an enlightenment and a discovery.  It will give us revelations of ourselves; for never do we find Him save as we find Him in His, and we are His.  You will not know who and what you are until you get far enough ahead, my master, to look back upon yourself.  We must go up and go on a long way before we know what we are now.”

Here the conversation paused for a while and nothing disturbed the profound silence but the roar of the rapids whose ceaseless sound swelled and sank in the silence like the waves of the sea.  At length the man said, “Have you thought of the land ahead?  Is it real?  And where is it, and what the life lived there?”