drugged by the body? I don't feel that I am losing anything by losing
the body."

"No, not losing," said Amroth, "but, happy though you are, you are not
gaining things as fast now--it is your time of rest and refreshment--but
we shall go back, both of us, to the other life again, when the time
comes: and the point is this, that we have got to win the best things
through trouble and struggle."

"But even so," I said, "there are many things I do not understand--the
child that opens its eyes upon the world and closes them again; the
young child that suffers and dies, just when it is the darling of the
home; and at the other end of the scale, the helpless, fractious
invalid, or the old man who lives in weariness, wakeful and tortured,
and who is glad just to sit in the sun, indifferent to every one and
everything, past feeling and hoping and thinking--or, worst of all, the
people with diseased minds, whose pain makes them suspicious and
malignant. What is the meaning of all this pain, which seems to do
people nothing but harm, and makes them a burden to themselves and
others too?"

"Oh," said he, "it is difficult enough; but you must remember that we
are all bound up with the hearts and lives of others; the child that
dies in its helplessness has a meaning for its parents; the child that
lives long enough to be the light of its home, that has a significance
deep enough; and all those who have to tend and care for the sick, to
lighten the burden and the sorrow for them, that has a meaning surely
for all concerned? The reason why we feel as we do about broken lives,
why they seem so utterly purposeless, is because we have the proportion
so wrong. We do not really, in fact, believe in immortality, when we are