60 THE GOLOSHES OF FORTUN«.

races like sails, transparent and floating in the thin air. Ow
earth hung over his head like a great dark red ball.

He immediately became aware of a number of beings, who were
certainly what we call “men,” but their appearance was very
different from ours. If they had been put up in arow and painted,
one would have said, “ That’s a beautiful arabesque!” They
had also a language ; but no one could expect that the soul of
the watchman should understand it. But the watchman’s soul
did understand it, for our souls have far greater abilities than we
suppose. Does not its wonderful drarnatic talents show itself in
our dreams? Then every one of our acquaintances appears
speaking in his own character and with his own voice, in a way
that not one of us could imitate in our waking hours. How does
our soul bring back to us people of whom we have not thought
for many years? Suddenly they come into our souls with their
smallest peculiarities about them. In fact, it is a fearful thing,
that memory which our souls possess: it can reproduce every sin,
every bad thought. And then, it may be asked, shall we be able
to give an account of every idle word that has been in our hearts
and on our lips?

Thus the watchman’s soul understood the language of the
people in the moon very well. They disputed about this earth,
and doubted if it could be inhabited; the air, they asserted, must
be too thick for a sensible moon-man to live there. They con-
sidered that the moon alone was peopled ; for that, they said,
was the real body in which the old-world people dwelt. They
also talked of politics.

But let us go down to the East Street, and see how it fared
with the body of the watchman.

He sat lifeless upon the stairs. His pike had fallen out of his
hand, and his eyes stared up at the moon, which his honest body
was wondering about. %

“What’s o'clock, watchman?” asked a passer-by. But th
man who didn’t answer was the watchman. Then the passengers
tweaked him quite gently by the nose, and then he lost his
balance. There lay the body stretched out at full length—the
man was dead. All his comrades were very much frightened :
dead he was, and dead he remained. It was reported, and it was
discussed, and in the morning the body was carried out to the
hospital. :

That would be a pretty jest for the soul if it should chance to
come back, and probably seek its body in the East Street, and
not find it! Most likely it would go first to the police and after-
wards to the address office, that inquiries might be made from
thence respecting the missing goods ; and then it would wander
out to the hospital. But we may console ourselves with the idea
that the soul is most clever when it acts upon its own account ;
it is the body that makes it stupid.