one of the last drives with this friend he asked for champagne and
when it was brought declared that he was dying as he had lived, "beyond
his means"--his happy humour lighting up even his last hours.

Early in November Ross left Paris to go down to the Riviera with his
mother: for Reggie Turner had undertaken to stay with Oscar. Reggie
Turner describes how he grew gradually feebler and feebler, though to
the end flashes of the old humour would astonish his attendants. He
persisted in saying that Reggie, with his perpetual prohibitions, was
qualifying for a doctor. "When you can refuse bread to the hungry,
Reggie," he would say, "and drink to the thirsty, you can apply for your
diploma."

Towards the end of November Reggie wired for Ross and Ross left
everything and reached Paris next day.

When all was over he wrote to a friend giving him a very complete
account of the last hours of Oscar Wilde; that account he generously
allows me to reproduce and it will be found word for word in the
Appendix; it is too long and too detailed to be used here.

Ross's letter should be read by the student; but several touches in it
are too timid; certain experiences that should be put in high relief are
slurred over: in conversation with me he told more and told it better.

For example, when talking of his drives with Oscar, he mentions
casually that Oscar "insisted on drinking absinthe," and leaves it at
that. The truth is that Oscar stopped the victoria at almost the first
cafe, got down and had an absinthe. Two or three hundred yards further
on, he stopped the carriage again to have another absinthe: at the next
stoppage a few minutes later Ross ventured to remonstrate:

"You'll kill yourself, Oscar," he cried, "you know the doctors said
absinthe was poison to you!"

Oscar stopped on the sidewalk:

"And what have I to live for, Bobbie?" he asked gravely. And Ross
looking at him and noting the wreck--the symptoms of old age and broken
health--could only bow his head and walk on with him in silence. What
indeed had he to live for who had abandoned all the fair uses of life?

The second scene is horrible: but is, so to speak, the inevitable
resultant of the first, and has its own awful moral. Ross tells how he
came one morning to Oscar's death-bed and found him practically
insensible: he describes the dreadful loud death-rattle of his breath,
and says: "terrible offices had to be carried out."

The truth is still more appalli