nvalidism, during a part of which I shared his most intimate
daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons. Did not my own
consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer itself into this
brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing record? I, too, seemed
to feel the delight of carrying with me, as if they were my own, the
charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere. I shared his
heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social triumphs, I was
honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about him, I was
wronged by the indignity from which he suffered, mourned with him in his
sorrow, and thus, after I had been living for months with his memory, I
felt as if I should carry a part of his being with me so long as my
self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.

The years passed away, and the influences derived from the companionships
I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own current of being.
Then there came to me a new experience in my relations with an eminent
member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually for a long
period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a prelude to a
work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances. He was the
subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost necessarily fatal
disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon itself if it were
not supplied with food from without, he determined to write a treatise on
a subject which had greatly interested him, and which would oblige him to
bestow much of his time and thought upon it, if indeed he could hold out
to finish the work. During the period while he was engaged in writing
it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect health, died suddenly of
pneumonia. Physical suffering, mental distress, the prospect of death at
a near, if uncertain, time always before him, it was hard to conceive a
more terrible strain than that which he had to endure. When, in the hour
of his greatest need, his faithful companion, the wife of many years of
happy union, whose hand had smoothed his pillow, whose voice had consoled
and cheered him, was torn from him after a few days of illness, I felt
that my, friend's trial was such that the cry of the man of many
afflictions and temptations might well have escaped from his lips: "I was
at ease, but he hath broken me asunder; he hath also taken me by my neck
and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His arc