r in a sanitarium, or had he stopped all
work completely and taken even a brief vacation, he might have averted
the collapse which was to come. In the spring of 1905 he began to
manifest alarming signs of nervous exhaustion. A summer in Peterboro
brought no improvement. That autumn his ailment was seen to be far
more deeply seated than had been supposed. There were indications of
an obscure brain lesion, baffling but sinister. Then began a very
gradual, progressive, and infinitely pathetic decline--the slow
beginning of the end. He suffered little pain, and until the last
months he preserved in an astonishing degree his physical well-being.
It was clear almost from the start that he was beyond the aid of
medical science, even the boldest and most expert. A disintegration of
the brain-tissues had begun--an affection to which specialists
hesitated to give a precise name, but which they recognized as
incurable. His mind became as that of a little child. He sat quietly,
day after day, in a chair by a window, smiling patiently from time to
time at those about him, turning the pages of a book of fairy tales
that seemed to give him a definite pleasure, and greeting with a
fugitive gleam of recognition certain of his more intimate friends.
Toward the last his physical condition became burdensome, and he sank
rapidly. At nine o'clock on the evening of January 23, 1908, in the
beginning of his forty-seventh year, he died at the Westminster Hotel,
New York, in the presence of the heroic woman who for almost a quarter
of a century had been his devoted companion, counsellor, helpmate, and
friend. After such simple services as would have pleased him, held at
St. George's Episcopal Church, on January 25, his body was taken to
Peterboro; and on the following day, a Sunday, he was buried in the
sight of many of his neighbours, who had followed in procession, on
foot, the passage of the body through the snow-covered lane from the
village. His grave is on an open hill-top, commanding one of the
spacious and beautiful views that he had loved. On a bronze tablet are
these lines of his own, which he had devised as a motto for his "From
a Log Cabin," the last music that he wrote:

"A house of dreams untold,
It looks out over the whispering tree-tops
And faces the setting sun."

CHAPTER II

PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS

In his personal intercourse with the world, MacDowell, like so many
sensitive and gifted men, had the misfor