d exclaimed:

"Deborah! Deborah!"

And then he dropped his arms by his side, and with a long, deep-drawn
sigh fell asleep. The name of his old wife was the last word upon his
dying lips.

No one but the doctor knew what had happened. He bent over the lifeless
shell, gazed on the face, felt the pulse, felt the heart, and then stood
up and said:

"All is over, my dear friends. His passage has been quite painless. I
never saw an easier death."

And he drew up the sheet over the face of the dead.

Although all day they had hourly expected this end, yet now they could
not quite believe that it had indeed come.

The huge, strong man, the rugged Iron King--dead? He who, if not as
indestructible as he seemed, was at least constituted of that stern
stuff of which centenarians are made, and whom all expected should live
far up into the eighties or nineties--dead? The father who had lived
over them like some mighty governing and protecting power all their
lives, necessary, inevitable, inseparable from their lives--dead?

"Come, my dear," said Mr. Clarence, gently raising Corona and leading
her away. "You have this to console you: he died reconciled to you,
holding your hand in his to the last."

"Ah, dear Uncle Clarence, you have much more to console you, for you
never failed even once in your duty to him, and never gave him one
moment of uneasiness in all your life," replied Corona, as she left him
in front of her old room.

She entered and shut the door and gave way to the natural grief that
overwhelmed her for a time.

When she was sufficiently composed she sat down and wrote to her
brother, informing him of what had occurred, and telling him that she
still held her purpose of going out to him with the Nevilles.

CHAPTER XXXII.

"SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI."

If old Aaron Rockharrt, the Iron King, had never been generally loved,
he was certainly very highly respected by the whole community. The news
of his sudden death fell like a shock upon the public. Preparations for
the obsequies were on the grandest scale.

They occupied two days. On the first day there were funeral services at
Rockhold, performed by the Rev. Luke Melville, pastor of the North End
Mission Church, and attended by all the neighboring families, as well as
by all the operatives of the works. After these were over, the whole
assembly, many in carriages and many more on foot, followed the hearse
that carried the remains to the North End