 and all time, I understood
her meaning. She had indeed made good her promise in a sense compared with which
its literal fulfillment would have been a disappointment. She had introduced me
to a circle of friends whom the century that had elapsed since last I communed
with them had aged as little as it had myself. Their spirit was as high, their
wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as contagious, as when their speech
had whiled away the hours of a former century. Lonely I was not and could not be
more, with this goodly companionship, however wide the gulf of years that gaped
between me and my old life.
    »You are glad I brought you here,« exclaimed Edith, radiant, as she read in
my face the success of her experiment. »It was a good idea, was it not, Mr.
West? How stupid in me not to think of it before! I will leave you now with your
old friends, for I know there will be no company for you like them just now; but
remember you must not let old friends make you quite forget new ones!« and with
that smiling caution she left me.
    Attracted by the most familiar of the names before me, I laid my hand on a
volume of Dickens, and sat down to read. He had been my prime favorite among the
book-writers of the century, - I mean the nineteenth century, - and a week had
rarely passed in my old life during which I had not taken up some volume of his
works to while away an idle hour. Any volume with which I had been familiar
would have produced an extraordinary impression, read under my present
circumstances, but my exceptional familiarity with Dickens, and his consequent
power to call up the associations of my former life, gave to his writings an
effect no others could have had, to intensify, by force of contrast, my
appreciation of the strangeness of my present environment. However new and
astonishing one's surroundings, the tendency is to become a part of them so soon
that almost from the first the power to see them objectively and fully measure
their strangeness, is lost. That power, already dulled in my case, the pages of
Dickens restored by carrying me back through their associations to the
standpoint of my former life. With a clearness which I had not been able before
to attain, I saw now the past and present, like contrasting pictures, side by
side.
    The genius of the great novelist of the nineteenth century, like that of
Homer, might indeed defy time; but the setting
