Mrs. Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all
the boys will be little fossils, and then we shall be a collection."
There was no fear more chimerical for Fleeming; years brought him no
repose; he was as packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first;
weariness, to which he began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not
quiet him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate which had
overtaken his mother; others shared the fear. In the changed life now
made for his family, the elders dead, the sons going from home upon
their education, even their tried domestic (Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving
the house after twenty-two years of service, it was not unnatural that
he should return to dreams of Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he
told me) on "a real honeymoon tour." He had not been alone with his
wife "to speak of," he added, since the birth of his children. But now
he was to enjoy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these last days,
that she was his "Heaven on earth." Now he was to revisit Italy, and see
all the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he admired so
warmly, and lay aside for a time the irritations of his strenuous
activity. Nor was this all. A trifling operation was to restore his
former lightness of foot; and it was a renovated youth that was to set
forth upon this re-enacted honeymoon.

The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it seemed
to go well, no fear was entertained; and his wife was reading aloud to
him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to wander in his mind. It
is doubtful if he ever recovered a sure grasp upon the things of life;
and he was still unconscious when he passed away, June the 12th, 1885,
in the fifty-third year of his age. He passed; but something in his
gallant vitality had impressed itself upon his friends, and still
impresses. Not from one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale
of how the imagination refuses to accept our loss, and instinctively
looks for his reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image
like things of yesterday. Others, the well-beloved too, die and are
progressively forgotten: two years have passed since Fleeming was laid
to rest beside his father, his mother, and his uncle John; and the
thought and the look of our friend still haunts us.

END OF VOL. IX

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