a pleasure. Half an hour after midnight, on the 8th of February, she
fell asleep: it is supposed in her seventy-eighth year.

Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of this
family were taken away; but taken with such features of opportunity in
time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief was tempered with a
kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was profound. His pious
optimism increased and became touched with something mystic and filial.
"The grave is not good, the approaches to it are terrible," he had
written in the beginning of his mother's illness: he thought so no more,
when he had laid father and mother side by side at Stowting. He had
always loved life; in the brief time that now remained to him he seemed
to be half in love with death. "Grief is no duty," he wrote to Miss
Bell; "it was all too beautiful for grief," he said to me, but the
emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths; his
wife thought he would have broken his heart when he must demolish the
Captain's trophy in the dining-room, and he seemed thenceforth scarcely
the same man.

These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his
vitality; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he was worn out by hope.
The singular invention to which he gave the name of "Telpherage" had of
late consumed his time, overtaxed his strength, and overheated his
imagination. The words in which he first mentioned his discovery to
me--"I am simply Alnaschar"--were not only descriptive of his state of
mind, they were in a sense prophetic; since, whatever fortune may await
his idea in the future, it was not his to see it bring forth fruit.
Alnaschar he was indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a
world filled with telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and
family but all his friends enriched. It was his pleasure, when the
company was floated, to endow those whom he liked with stock; one, at
least, never knew that he was a possible rich man until the grave had
closed over his stealthy benefactor. And however Fleeming chafed among
material and business difficulties, this rainbow vision never faded; and
he, like his father and his mother, may be said to have died upon a
pleasure. But the strain told, and he knew that it was telling. "I am
becoming a fossil," he had written five years before, as a kind of plea
for a holiday visit to his beloved Italy. "Take care! If I am Mr.
Fossil, you will be