The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 143: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

136 What Shall She Do? / opinion, make the most courageous speak in low and rev- erent tones. The family, one may know, have only gone to the village to lay in their week’s supply of groceries, but the effect is the same. The other hours are at night or early morning, when the house is full of loved ones. There is something awful in passing by the face of a sleeper, and, looking upon that quiet face which knows us not, to be conscious that our nearest and dearest is, though bodily present, far away, wandering in the realms of the unknown; entering the field of spirits, meeting, perhaps, with angels whom we know not. Added to this feeling of care, which steals over one as he contemplates the face of the sleeper, comes also a slight tinge of jealousy and of fear, lest when the sleeper does awaken the dream visitants may not leave the friend of yesterday exactly the same to-day; we are conscious also that the other part of our life, lying there so silent, is now in that oblivion, the type of the deeper one we all must enter later! For her lying there, the world is nothing. The book is finished, the music silent, the work done! It is as if she were not. This sensation will come at any time when we gaze upon the sleeping faces of a household, but more strongly does it come in the early hours of morning light. Coming into the room, ready for work, we feel the sleepers should be back in the world also, and are surprised that they are not; and because they do not respond to our silent pres- ence by awakening we shudder and draw back. A house with no one in it may be ghostly, but it must (E(o) EOmIicbooks