notwithstanding we are so completely transformed without and within. I
say we are not the same, and thank God, for their sweet sakes, that we
are not. Surely that is not a mere dispute about words."

"But, if we are not those girls, then what has become of them?" asked
Mrs. Slater.

"You might better ask what had become of them if you had to seek them in
us; but I will tell you what has become of them, Sarah. It is what will
become of us when we, in our turn, vanish from earth, and the places that
know us now shall know us no more. They are immortal with God, and we
shall one day meet them over there."

"What a very odd idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Slater, regarding her friend with
astonishment.

Miss Ludington flushed slightly as she replied, "I don't think it half so
odd, and not nearly so repulsive, as your notion, that we old women are
the mummies of the girls who came before us. It is easier, as well as far
sweeter, for me to believe that our youth is somewhere immortal, than
that it has been withered, shrivelled, desiccated into our old age. Oh,
no, my dear, Paradise is not merely a garden of withered flowers! We
shall find the rose and lily of our life blooming there."

The hours had slipped away unnoticed as the friends talked together, and
now the lengthening shadows on the school-room floor recalled Miss
Ludington to the present, and to the duties of a hostess.

As they walked slowly across the green toward the homestead, she told her
friend more fully of this belief in the immortality of past selves which