ty a thought to bear being trifled with, and turned out and
admitted in this abrupt way.

I had reason to rejoice in the firmness of my gloomy thoughts, when,
about ten o'clock on Thursday evening, Mr. Carlisle told us to prepare
ourselves, for we had reason to expect the fatal event every moment. To
my thinking, she did not appear to be in that state of total exhaustion,
which I supposed to precede death; but it is probable that death does
not always take place by that gradual process I had pictured to myself;
a sudden pang may accelerate his arrival. She did not die on Thursday
night.

Till now it does not appear that she had any serious thoughts of dying;
but on Friday and Saturday, the two last days of her life, she
occasionally spoke as if she expected it. This was however only at
intervals; the thought did not seem to dwell upon her mind. Mr. Carlisle
rejoiced in this. He observed, and there is great force in the
suggestion, that there is no more pitiable object, than a sick man, that
knows he is dying. The thought must be expected to destroy his courage,
to co-operate with the disease, and to counteract every favourable
effort of nature.

On these two days her faculties were in too decayed a state, to be able
to follow any train of ideas with force or any accuracy of connection.
Her religion, as I have already shown, was not calculated to be the
torment of a sick bed; and, in fact, during her whole illness, not one
word of a religious cast fell from her lips.

She was affectionate and compliant to the last. I observed on Friday and
Saturday nights, that, whenever her attendants recommended to her to
sleep, she discovered her willingness to yield, by breathing, perhaps
for the space of a minute, in the manner of a person that sleeps, though
the effort, from the state of her disorder, usually proved ineffectual.

She was not tormented by useless contradiction. One night the servant,
from an error in judgment, teazed her with idle expostulations, but she
complained of it grievously, and it was corrected. "Pray, pray, do not
let her reason with me," was her expression. Death itself is scarcely so
dreadful to the enfeebled frame, as the monotonous importunity of nurses
ever-lastingly repeated.

Seeing that every hope was extinct, I was very desirous of obtaining
from her any directions, that she might wish to have followed after her
decease. Accordingly, on Saturday morning, I talked to her for a good
while of