and single that hopes soon to be merried.  My husband that’s dead and gone always believed that we all get to heaven sooner or later,—­and sence I’ve grown older and buried so many that I’ve loved I’ve come to feel that perhaps I should meet all of them that I’ve known here—­or at least as many of ’em as I wanted to—­in a better world.  And though I don’t calculate there is any boarding-houses in heaven, I hope I shall some time or other meet them that has set round my table one year after another, all together, where there is no fault-finding with the food and no occasion for it,—­and if I do meet them and you there—­or anywhere,—­if there is anything I can do for you....

....Poor dear soul!  Her ideas had got a little mixed, and her heart was overflowing, and the white handkerchief closed the scene with its timely and greatly needed service.

—­What a pity, I have often thought, that she came in just at that precise moment!  For the old Master was on the point of telling us, and through one of us the reading world,—­I mean that fraction of it which has reached this point of the record,—­at any rate, of telling you, Beloved, through my pen, his solution of a great problem we all have to deal with.  We were some weeks longer together, but he never offered to continue his reading.  At length I ventured to give him a hint that our young friend and myself would both of us be greatly gratified if he would begin reading from his unpublished page where he had left off.

—­No, sir,—­he said,—­better not, better not.  That which means so much to me, the writer, might be a disappointment, or at least a puzzle, to you, the listener.  Besides, if you’ll take my printed book and be at the trouble of thinking over what it says, and put that with what you’ve heard me say, and then make those comments and reflections which will be suggested to a mind in so many respects like mine as is your own,—­excuse my good opinion of myself,

(It is a high compliment to me, I replied) you will perhaps find you have the elements of the formula and its consequences which I was about to read you.  It’s quite as well to crack your own filberts as to borrow the use of other people’s teeth.  I think we will wait awhile before we pour out the Elixir Vitae.

—­To tell the honest truth, I suspect the Master has found out that his formula does not hold water quite so perfectly as he was thinking, so long as he kept it to himself, and never thought of imparting it to anybody else.  The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity, as.  I have noticed that a great pumpkin, the wonder of a village, seemed to lose at least a third of its dimensions between the field where it grew and the cattle-show fair-table, where it took its place with other enormous pumpkins from other wondering villages.  But however that maybe, I shall always regret that I had not the opportunity of judging for myself how completely the Master’s formula, which, for him, at least, seemed to have solved the great problem, would have accomplished that desirable end for me.