Page:Artabanzanus (Ferrar, 1896).djvu/98

90 death—annihilation—would have been to me then; but it was not to be. My mind was in a perfect state of confusion. Occasionally I heard a distant door being opened and shut, and again and again the frightful yells, horrid oaths, howls, roars, and screams smote on my ears. What could it all mean? The Doctor was evidently a kind man; he spoke to me in the gentlest manner, and laid his hand, which was like that of a sensitive woman, lightly on my heart, and called me his dear boy. Where was I, then, and who was this mysterious doctor? Ha! the whole truth like a bright light flashed upon me—a great battle had been fought. I was in one of the military hospitals, and the Doctor was the man whom I had seen driving furiously past the Demon and myself on his way to see King Charles the Second.

What did the hospitals of the Emperor Valens and those of other potentates do without the ministering angels, the Florence Nightingales, of our day? Perhaps they had them, but there were none here—no Sister Rose Gertrudes, no fair and sweet daughters of love and charity to soothe with gentle hands and words the last moments of the dying, or communicate renewed joy day by day by their presence to those who were being restored to life. There were no flowers to scatter on the ashes of the dead, and no dear young hands to scatter them. There was no drum of the funeral march to proclaim to a sorrowing nation that its greatest warrior was no more. This may be indeed only a world of shadows; the shadows in it may have no sense or feeling, but still I say it is possible that it may turn out to be a more real and substantial world than the one of coarse matter and substance in which we live. For the things which we actually see and feel are temporal, while those which we have never yet seen or known are eternal. Whether for good or for evil there comes no death in that