would I close my eyes than his image would appear standing at a
distance of three or four feet from the head of the bed, in the form
of a column five feet high or so and about four feet in circumference.
The colour was blue, but varied in depth and intensity; on some nights
it was sky-blue, but usually of a deeper shade, a pure, soft,
beautiful blue like that of the morning-glory or wild geranium.

It would not surprise me to find that many persons have some such
material image or presentment of the spiritual entities they are
taught to believe in at too tender an age. Recently, in comparing
childish memories with a friend, he told me that he too always saw God
as a blue object, but of no definite shape.

That blue column haunted me at night for many months; I don't think it
quite vanished, ceasing to be anything but a memory, until I was
seven--a date far ahead of where we are now.

To return to that second blissful revelation which came to me from my
mother. Happy as it made me to know that death would not put an end to
my existence, my state after the first joyful relief was not one of
perfect happiness. All she said to comfort and make me brave had
produced its effect--I knew now that death was but a change to an even
greater bliss than I could have in this life. How could I, not yet
six, think otherwise than as she had told me to think, or have a
doubt? A mother is more to her child than any other being, human or
divine, can ever be to him in his subsequent life. He is as dependent
on her as any fledgling in the nest on its parent--even more, since
she warms his callow mind or soul as well as body.

Notwithstanding all this, the fear of death came back to me in a