"Lay down,

your sweet and weary head,

Night is falling,

You have come to journey's end,

Sleep now -- dream of the ones who came before..."

A scene so commonplace in the world as to be nothing more than ordinary was unfolding in a small, but bright and cheery bedroom towards the back of Bag End.

"And all will turn to silver glass,

A light on the water,

Gray ships pass

Into the west..."

A pretty hobbit lass was singing a soft and wistful lullaby to a tiny child with large, but sleepy blue eyes, and dark brown curls framing her porcelain face. The child was very nearly asleep, and her mother's tone was becoming softer as the lass nodded.

Unaware to both mother and nearly sleeping child, another was watching the scene in the bedroom, his expressive blue eyes, so very much like his small daughter's, unusually bright with unshed tears. He stood, silent and still, simply watching them in their simple, everyday tableau...a picture he had never dreamed to see...

Closing his eyes, drifting away to the soft crooning of the lullaby, the gentlehobbit began to imagine, and to remember.

Another bedroom, another mother, the hobbit mistress the very picture of the child in the current bed, but older, married and with a son of her own. Frodo could see himself, curled up in his bed at Brandy Hall, blankets tucked up beneath his chin, trying so very hard to stay awake...His mother seated next to him, softly telling him a story he could not later recall, one full of wonder and magic and elves. With little hobbit lads who save the day.

A scene in this same bedroom, this time the child was himself, securely tucked into the same bed; a much-loved and achingly familiar form sitting in a chair alongside. Bilbo was reading from a text he had translated from the Elvish Quenya, one of the many stories of Beren and Luthien Tinuviel, still one of Frodo's favorite stories. How often he had been lulled to sleep by that gentle but laughing voice in his boyhood...he could almost hear Bilbo's soft words, so close and yet so far away now...

And then the dream-like image faded away, the mists of the mind forming a barrier the gentle-hobbit was forced to struggle through to view what lay beyond.

To his surprise, and yet then again not...his cerulean blue eyes were met with a scene he hadn't dared hope to ever even imagine...He was sitting next to another bed, one smaller than the one currently occupying that room, but somehow familiar just the same. A very young lad lay in the center of it, snuggly wrapped in blankets and looking very small with the large pillows behind his dark brown curls. His eyes were the same impossible blue as the lass currently being sung to sleep by her mother, but with another's features also...The child couldn't have been more than four or five, and was quickly being overtaken by sleep. But the biggest surprise to the dreamer was the hobbit sitting in a familiar chair next to the bed. It was himself, several years from that time, dark curls turned almost all to silver, only a few dark hairs still left to proclaim their original color. He was smiling softly to himself, gently singing the same sweetly sad lullaby he could still hear coming from the mother and daughter scene still before him. Somehow, the gentlehobbit knew that this was not his own son, but rather a grandlad, a child of the lass so young and tender now, but someday to grow up, marry, and begin her own life, with her own family.

And he would be there. Not only would he live to see his own children grow up, he would be there to read and sing and watch his children's children...not in his wildest imaginings had he ever imagined he would be granted such a gift. Such a precious thing...

"What can you see

On the horizon?

Why do the white gulls call?"

("Into The West" by Fran Walsh, Howard Shore, and Annie Lennox, ROTK, New Line Cinema, Peter Jackson)