other enjoyable things of earth must perish with her. Then the
country frolics; the homely humor; the broad, open-mouthed roar of
laughter, in which body and soul conjoin so heartily! I fear that
no other world call show its anything just like this. As for purely
moral enjoyments, the good will find them in every state of being.
But where the material and the moral exist together, what is to
happen then? And then our mute four-footed friends and the winged
songsters of our woods! Might it not be lawful to regret them, even
in the hallowed groves of paradise?"

"You speak like the very spirit of earth, imbued with a scent of
freshly turned soil," exclaimed my friend.

"It is not that I so much object to giving up these enjoyments on my
own account," continued I, "but I hate to think that they will have
been eternally annihilated from the list of joys."

"Nor need they be," he replied. "I see no real force in what you
say. Standing in this Hall of Fantasy, we perceive what even the
earth-clogged intellect of man can do in creating circumstances
which, though we call them shadowy and visionary, are scarcely more
so than those that surround us in actual life. Doubt not then that
man's disembodied spirit may recreate time and the world for itself,
with all their peculiar enjoyments, should there still be human
yearnings amid life eternal and infinite. But I doubt whether we
shall be inclined to play such a poor scene over again."

"O, you are ungrateful to our mother earth!" rejoined I. "Come what
may, I never will forget her! Neither will it satisfy me to have
her exist merely in idea. I want her great, round, solid self to