rst sad objects on which their eyes
fell was the dead body of Sir John Crang with Mr. Molesworth, alive but
sadly injured and bleeding, stretched across it. Apparently they had
managed to crawl from the wreck of the carriage before Sir John succumbed,
or Mr. Molesworth had managed to drag his companion out--whether dead or
alive cannot be told--before himself fainting from loss of blood.

The toll of the disaster, as is generally known, amounted to twelve killed
and seventeen more or less seriously injured. Help having been summoned
from M---- Station, the injured--or as many of them as could be removed--
were conveyed in an ambulance train to Plymouth. Among them was Mr.
Molesworth, whose apparent injuries were a broken hip, a laceration of the
thigh, and an ugly, jagged scalp-wound. Of all these he made, in time, a
fair recovery: but what brought him under my care was the nervous shock
from which his brain, even while his body healed, never made any promising
attempt to rally. For some time after the surgeon had pronounced him
cured he lingered on, a visibly dying man, and died in the end of utter
nervous collapse.

Yet even within a few days of the end his brain kept an astonishing
clearness: and to me, as well as to the friends who visited him in
hospital and afterwards in his Plymouth lodgings--for he never returned
home again, being unable to face another railway journey--he would
maintain, and with astonishing vigour and lucidity of description, that he
had actually in very truth travelled down the valley in company with Sir
John Crang, and seen with his own eyes everything related in the foregoing
paper. Now, as a record of what did undeniably pass through the brain of
a cultivated man in some catastrophic moments, I found these recollections
of his exceedingly interesting. As no evidence is harder to collect, so
almost none can be of higher importance, than that of man's sensations at
the exact moment when he passes, naturally or violently, out of this
present life into whatever may be beyond. Partly because Mr. Molesworth's
story, which he persisted in, had this scientific value; partly in the
hope of diverting his mind from the lethargy into which I perceived it to
be sinking; I once begged him to write the whole story down. To this,
however, he was unequal. His will betrayed him as soon as he took pen and
paper.

The entire veracity of his recollection he none the less affirmed again
and again, a