hese were the last words he ever
spoke, and in two or three hours afterwards he breathed his last.

Then in a few years more the _crescendo_ wave of trouble took my
mother from me at the age of eighty-three. For the last two or three
years she had entirely lost her memory, and for the last few months
the use of her mental faculties. And she did not suffer much. The last
words she uttered were "Poor Cecilia!"--her mind reverting in her
latest moments to the child whose loss had been the most recent. She
had for years entertained a great horror and dread of the possibility
of being buried alive, in consequence of the very short time allowed
by the law for a body to remain unburied after death; and she had
exacted from me a promise that I would in any case cause a vein to be
opened in her arm after death. In her case there could be no possible
room for the shadow of doubt as to the certainty of death; but I was
bound by my promise, and found some difficulty in the performance of
it. The medical man in attendance, declaring the absolute absurdity of
any doubt on the subject, refused to perform an operation which, he
said, was wholly uncalled for, and argued that my promise could only
be understood to apply to a case of possible doubt. I had none; but
was none the less determined to be faithful to my promise. But it
was not till I declared that I would myself sever a vein, in however
butcher-like a manner, that I induced him to accompany me to the
death-chamber and perform under my eyes the necessary operation.

My mother, the inseparable companion of so many wanderings in so many
lands, the indefatigable labourer of so many years, found her rest
near to the two who had gone from my house before, in the beautiful
little cemetery on which the Apennine looks down.

But it was not long before this sorrow was followed by a very much
sorer one--by the worst of all that could have happened to me! After
what I have written in the last chapter it is needless to say anything
of the blank despair that fell upon me when my wife died, on the 13th
of April, 1865. She also lies near the others.

My house was indeed left unto me desolate, and I thought that life and
all its sweetness was over for me!

I immediately took measures for disposing of the house in the Piazza
dell' Independenza, and before long found a purchaser for it. I had
bought it when the speculator, who had become the owner of the ground
at the corner of the space whi