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salad; stale eggs and roasted cocks'-combs furnished the grand dish of the
repast; the wine even was not without a disgusting taste--it was like a
medicinal draught.

At night the boxes and other effects of the passengers were placed against the
rickety doors. One of the travellers kept watch while the others slept. The
sentry was our young Divine. How close it was in the chamber! The heat
oppressive to suffocation--the gnats hummed and stung unceasingly--the
"miserabili" without whined and moaned in their sleep.

"Travelling would be agreeable enough," said he groaning, "if one only had no
body, or could send it to rest while the spirit went on its pilgrimage
unhindered, whither the voice within might call it. Wherever I go, I am
pursued by a longing that is insatiable--that I cannot explain to myself, and
that tears my very heart. I want something better than what is but what is
fled in an instant. But what is it, and where is it to be found? Yet, I know
in reality what it is I wish for. Oh! most happy were I, could I but reach one
aim--could but reach the happiest of all!"

And as he spoke the word he was again in his home; the long white curtains
hung down from the windows, and in the middle of the floor stood the black
coffin; in it he lay in the sleep of death. His wish was fulfilled--the body
rested, while the spirit went unhindered on its pilgrimage. "Let no one deem
himself happy before his end," were the words of Solon; and here was a new and
brilliant proof of the wisdom of the old apothegm.

Every corpse is a sphynx of immortality; here too on the black coffin the
sphynx gave us no answer to what he who lay within had written two days
before:

"O mighty Death! thy silence teaches nought,
Thou leadest only to the near grave's brink;
Is broken now the ladder of my thoughts?
Do I instead of mounting only sink?

Our heaviest grief the world oft seeth not,
Our sorest pain we hide from stranger eyes:
And for the sufferer there is nothing left
But the green mound that o'er the coffin lies."

Two figures were moving in the chamber. We knew them both; it was the fairy of
Care, and the emissary of Fortune. They both bent over the corpse.

"Do you now see," said Care, "what happiness your Galoshes have brought to
mankind?"

"To him, at least, who slumbers here, they have brought an imperishable
blessing," answered the other.

"Ah no!" replied Care. "He took his departure himself; he was not called away.
His mental powers here below were not strong enough to reach the treasures
lying beyond this life, and which his destiny ordained he should obtain. I
will now confer a benefit on him."

And she took the Galoshes from his feet; his sleep of death was ended; and he
who had been thus called back again to life arose from his dread couch in all
the vigor of youth. Care vanished, and with her the Galoshes. She has no doubt
taken them for herself, to keep them to all eternity.

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