138 SALMON FISHING IN CANADA. 



his companions find a gentler dismissal from the flesh: 

 theirs is the natural death, death with fewer of the ac- 

 companiments which invest the last act with terror and 

 awfulness. Yet, die when we will and how we will, there 

 is a mysteriousness about the moment of dissolution, 

 which must cause it to be expected with some measure of 

 fear and apprehension. The passing in that moment 

 from time to eternity the becoming in that instant a 

 disembodied spirit, a naked, unclothed soul, launched 

 upon an unknown scene, with none of the instru- 

 ments heretofore employed for the ingathering of know- 

 ledge or the communication of thought oh, who ever 

 marked, so far as it can be marked, the noiseless flitting 

 away of man's immortal part, without experiencing a 

 painful inquisitiveness as to what had become of that part, 

 as to where it was, as to what it saw, as to what it heard ? 

 There may be thorough assurance that the soul has gone 

 to be with the Lord ; but whilst this destroys all anxiety 

 on its account, it does not, cannot, repress the striving of 

 the mind to follow it in its flight, the intense gaze at the 

 folds of the veil which hangs between the present world 

 and the future, as if it must have been so far withdrawn 

 for the admission of the spirit just freed from the flesh, 

 that some glimpse might be caught by the watchful of the 

 unexplored region beyond. 



" But in vain this striving of the mind, this intenseness of 

 gaze. Whilst we live, it is as an infinite desert, which no 

 thought can traverse, that separates the two worlds; 



