was,

fellow, who built up an elaborate theory of soul affinities. But he ended by walking off with a married woman, which to say the least, a most immoral anticipation of God's purposes. Since I entered this state, I must own that I have not yet, for instance, blown up against my dear wife, who predeceased me by some few years; also that I have only met two of my very intimate friends. My wife was, I am sure, near as well as dear to me on earth, but, then, Fifth Avenue may not have been very dear to her. Possibly her soul is somewhere at home in England. On the other hand, time and time again I find myself mixed up with souls here that are not at all the sort I should have chosen to associate with before. It is puzzling. I shall be interested to see if we two do run across each other much. Good night."

I flung him gently into the air. He sailed quickly out of my sight, for the flowing river was dim now almost to extinction. I doubted somehow if we should meet again.

This had been illuminating. I saw at once where by sheer tactlessness I had failed in talking to the souls. I had assumed that they were unhappy. Not a bit of it. They had got what they wanted. Getting that, one always speaks of as a state of heaven upon earth. If, then, the final and eternal heaven turns out merely to be a little more of what we want, what sensible man should turn his back on it for that?

Nor could the souls run, of course, to great variety of disposition. And, roughly, as the parson said, one could divide them into two classes, the aboriginal population and the invaders. The invaders should have been the more interesting to talk to, for they had achieved here what they could only long for in life, and, one might think, were therefore actively enjoying themselves. But their complaint was that being in an enormous majority, they were mostly only against one another, blowing up all the time, so that they hardly got into touch with the true spirit of Fifth Avenue at all. It was of course a great

satisfaction to them to find they were really there at last, but they could tell me nothing much about it; and about the places they had lived in on earth they simply would not speak at all. Still, much could be guessed at by that.

The old inhabitants, the aborigines, were, one gathered, mostly women and butlers; and the butlers, who had been sent away to die, were always glad to be back in their element. I looked almost in vain for souls of the mighty men who had built the great houses and lent them their fame. I believe they are mostly to be found down in Wall Street, where they and the bankrupts and gamblers must make a busy crowd. I was assured of this, indeed, by a very ladylike soul. Business, she said, had been the one thing lovely and pleasant to her husband in his life, and in his death she most sincerely trusted he was not divided from it. Here was, by the way, a case of that affinity that had interested my preacher friend. This ladylike one had been a most successful hostess in New York, a model of charming manners, a great authority on good form; and now she was always being blown about with the soul of her butler. caused something of a scandal.

It

I rather wondered that so many of these clever, charming women should be left drifting about. I think that, to begin with, they had wondered at it too; for they had traveled all over the world, there was nobody they did not meet, nothing they could not do, given the talent and understanding that one supposes, of course, they had. They were not used, either, to live in their big houses for more than a few months in the year. But perhaps, despite the wonders of the world they saw and the glories of men's labor they glanced at and passed by, it was always the love of Fifth Avenue which was at the core of their hearts; so here they still are.

I did meet one most indignant party. He took me, goodness knows why! for a parson, and attacked me straight away.

"Call this a future life!" he said. "It 's disgraceful. You clergy ought to be ashamed of yourselves. No, never mind

what denomination you belong to; you were all in a gang together. It was a regular religious trust, and you know it. Well, I put myself in your hands. Sunday after Sunday I sat under the most. sensible one of you that I could find. I did what he said about giving money in charity and keeping well out of temptation. I believed all he told me; I squared the Bible with the higher criticism right along. I lived a decent life, and I died without a murmur when my time came. And now I'm not a bit better off than I was before. What are you going to do about it?"

"But you must like it," I urged, for I was sure of my ground by this. "You could n't be here at all unless you did like it, you know."

"It is n't a question of what I like," he persisted. "I did n't do things on earth because I liked doing them, but because they were the proper things to do. And when I made a firm contract, I kept it. You chaps made a contract with me about a future state of bliss, and I expect you to deliver the goods."

"No," I said; "it is strange."

He wanted me to form a committee on earth; was ready to subscribe, in reason, to its expenses if any means could be found of his doing so. He was sure that if the prominent citizens of New York could be brought to understand that heaven was so near to them and was kept in such a condition, they would see to its improvement at once, would remodel it, in fact, from end to end. He spoke of a traveling commission to visit similar future states in London, Paris, Berlin, and Budapest.

"We could adopt the best feature of each," he said, "and I am sure that in addition our well-known efficiency and powers of organization would not fail us.'

He was quite convinced that there was nothing either in the world or out of it which money and energy could not accomplish. I think he had been some sort of business man.

Then there was the soul of the painter that I found the wind beating frantically against the Metropolitan Museum. I asked him what in heaven's name he was

wanted the place kept more select. Not that he disliked all these other people, but he just thought they had n't any right to be there. He wanted to know if his soul could n't somehow be attached to his old house standing somewhere about Seventieth Street, which his widow and daughters still lived in. It would mark out a position for him, give him more dignity,

he said. He even thought that his old room might be set apart for him, and would n't I call on his widow and arrange it? But it was the general state of haphazardness that he most objected to.

"It's such a muddle," he grumbled. "I thought of forming a small, well-chosen committee to deal with the problem, but there's no means of getting one together. And when I am blown up against those that might suit, I find them absolutely selfish. Why that wonderful public spirit which used to animate us has not survived I cannot think."

turned out, of one of the most famous old masters in the collection. It was the best thing he had ever done. If he could have owned to it, it would have made his for

tune.

I said I thought not; that what we wanted nowadays was new masters, not old. But he would not listen to me; he was an academic soul. He had brooded on the wrong done him, on this theft of his genius that this snobbish flattery by the present of the past had committed, until his heart broke. He was sure, he said, that in a little while a kind wind would blow him into the museum itself and up against his masterpiece, and that then he would melt into it forever.

I have not said how strange the souls were to look at. Though their shapes did not answer at all to human shapes, yet by many curious variations they seemed to indicate character. I saw one once nearly five feet long and only a few inches broad, with curious markings all down. He was

spiteful when I spoke to him. I don't know what he had been. Mostly, though, they were irregular ovals and oblongs about eight inches by three. There were rhomboids, too, and I saw several squares. At least they looked quite square till you came to measure them up. There were some very tiny souls, some not larger than a dime, and there were some just scraps of rag, torn almost to bits; you wondered how they held together.

But it was the markings on them that were most curious. It was by these, even when they 'd speak least about themselves, that I could often tell what they once had been. For as the thing you are in this world stamps itself in time upon your face, so will the things you do stamp themselves forever on your soul. Nearly all of them, for instance, had touches of rather tarnished gilt. One rather large and wobbly soul you might almost have mistaken for a torn bit of Russian embroidery, and one was covered with fine, flowing lines like a Helleu etching. Some were warty; I never could bring myself to touch them. Many had holes in them, and some were thick, like little mattresses, and plain dark gray. And when I had begun to learn the language of the signs I found there were things marked upon some souls of which I cannot speak. They did not know that the evil thing was plain. They would speak to me as pleasantly and carelessly as you please; but while I listened to what they said, I looked at what they were. There were the jagged lines that told of secret cruelties, stained bloodred into the souls of the torturers, whose homes had been but dungeons of despair for weaker souls than they. There were the white disease spots of the coward; mildew spots that rot away in time the very substance of the soul. There were the blisters of slanderous thoughts, which thicken and coarsen till the soul, a horny mass, is not sensitive to truth and love and beauty any more. No, there is no hell for such spirits. Is there any need for one?

Some souls, I saw, too, scored with the marks of undeserved old suffering and loss. These would sometimes look like well

healed wounds, but with the women often they were only painted and powdered down, and I could see that still they festered a little and were diseased.

It was in the very depth of winter that I first found the Little Soul. The snow was thick and crisp, the night dark, and the air still. Mostly the souls must have been buried deep; for nothing beats them down like snow, and they have to wait for its thawing. But she had been lucky, and she hung to the branch of a tree that bordered the park, for all the world like a queer little gray icicle. I broke her off carefully, for she was frozen very stiff. She would not say much to me that time; she told me afterward that she had been shy. But I was quite used to that sort of thing, though indeed I had done her a kindness in taking her from the branch and, when she had thawed a little on my hand, letting her float up into the calm air. I remember noticing chiefly that she was very small (she did not overlap my palm as she lay on it), of a pretty oval shape, and light gray in color; she had a slight silver down on her, shaded here and there.

Not more than two days later I found her again, at the extreme end of my beat this time, beyond the reservoir. We talked for a while. She did not want to talk of herself, but asked much about me. This was the first time such a thing had happened with any soul. I told her that the end of my work was in sight and how I counted on leaving New York in a very few weeks for ever. Did n't I like it? she asked. I told her that I hated it, that I did not know whether I hated it more when I mixed in daytime with the people who thought they were alive or at nighttime with the people who knew they were dead. She said I was unfair; that it was a very fine city, and she was sure there were still very charming people in it.

"It's not my business to be fair," I said. "New York is too big and I'm too small; but I can love it or hate it if I like."

She asked why I really hated it. I told her. It was a sufficiently good reason.

She answered more readily now when I questioned her about herself. She had died young, at thirty-five or so, a bungled operation which the surgeons could not own to. She had been married to a wellknown man whose name I had seen, curiously enough, only a day before in the papers set to an announcement that he was marrying again. I was not sure whether to tell her this; then I did. She said she was very glad, and asked the name of the woman. I could n't remember.

"Not that it matters," she said. "If she's a reasonable sort of woman, they should be quite sufficiently happy."

"That is about the height of one's ambition," I said, "in making a second marriage."

After a pause she added:

"I was quite happy at least; I should have been foolish not to be."

"Did you leave any children?" I asked her. "Stepmothers are much whiter than they are painted, you know."

"No," she said. "I had three in the first five years of my marriage; but one died after two months, and two were born dead. Then the doctor said I was n't strong enough and forbade me to have any more. He could n't make out why I was n't strong enough,-he had tried all the tonics he could think of,-but I knew."

I waited for her to go on.

"It was n't that I did n't love my husband or that he did n't love me. I think he did, and he was always very kind. Though, indeed, people say that need not stop your having children; but I should think it would, should n't you?"

"Nature is not quite so nice," I answered.

She paused again. Then, unexpectedly she said:

"When were you in the country last?" I told her that a few weeks before I had gone for a walk on Long Island; how gray it had all looked, and dead!

"But in a week or two," she said, "the woods will be wonderful. The green of the trees will almost pain you with joy, it'll be so sharp and bright. And there 'll

be dogwood in all the woods, which promises a happy year.

"I was born when the dogwood was in blossom," she said. "When I was little it was my birthday flower. On that morning mother always had them make an arbor of it for me. And after breakfast I'd be put there to sit in state, and my presents would be brought to me. And when I died I know they put dogwood about my body and in my grave; that was in the springtime, too. They thought it a pretty thing to do, but what did it matter then? Well, what had it ever mattered? What had that life and the beauty. of it ever been to me from the beginning? Something I was taught to play with."

By now the barriers of my earthly state were down, and she spoke on quite simply to my soul.

"But for all that I don't belong here, you know," she said, "drifting about above Fifth Avenue, and it 's very dreadful. I never did belong here when I was alive, however happy I managed to be.”

"Where did you belong?" I asked. "In the wild places," she answered. "Then why did n't you go to them?" I spoke crossly. I have no patience with people who talk helplessly.

"Well, you see," she said, "my father was well off, and I was sent to school and brought out into society and married to the right sort of man. It was all done for my happiness; but always when my front door closed on me, it was like the door of a cage closing. I was out of doors whenever I could be. I had a garden-”

"You had vegetables for dinner, I don't doubt," I interrupted.

"What would you have done, then, had you been me?" she asked.

"Done what I wanted to," I told her. "But when you can't want?" she said. "Ah," said I, "there 's no remedy for that."

"You see," she went on, "I was taught life like a lesson. I learned it and I was repeating it, and then death came, and now it seems that I never even started to live. But is that why I 'm never going to die? Because that 's so dreadful.”