ugh for me, old fellow,' I interrupted; 'there was a
time, was there not, when he worked too fast for you and me?'

There are moments, for certain people, when such fantastic unreality as
this is the truest realism. Matthew and I talked like this with our
brains, because we hadn't the courage to allow our hearts to break in
upon the conversation. Had I dared to say some real emotional thing,
what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing?
and it was our aim that he should die with as little to-do as
practicable. The emotional in such situations is merely the obvious.
There was no need for either of us to state the elementary feelings of
our love. I knew that Matthew was going to die, and he knew that--I was
going to live, and we pitied each other accordingly; though I confess my
feeling for him was rather one of envy,--when it was not congratulation.

Thus, to tell the truth, we never mentioned 'the hereafter.' I don't
believe it even occurred to us. Indeed, we spent the few hours that
remained of our friendship in retailing the latest gathered of those
good stories with which we had been accustomed to salt our intercourse.

One of Matthew's anecdotes was, no doubt, somewhat suggested by the
occasion, and I should add that he had always somewhat of an
ecclesiastical bias--would, I believe, have ended some day as a
Monsignor, a notable 'Bishop Blougram.'

His story was of an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his
congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire. 'You know the
Black Country, my friends,' he had declaimed,' you have seen it, at
night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of
which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!),
snatch a precarious existence--you have seen them silhouetted against
the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in
the very jaws of the awful fire. Have you realised that the burdens with
which they thus run hither and thither are molten iron, iron to which
such a stupendous heat has been applied that it has melted, melted as
though it had been sugar in the sun?--well! returning to hell-fire, let
me tell you this, that in hell they eat this fiery molten metal for
ice-cream!--yes! and are glad to get anything so cool.'

It was thus we talked while Matthew lay dying, for why should we not
talk as we had lived? We both laughed long and heartily over this story;
perhaps it woul