dially.'

He extended his thin, white hand with a chilly smile towards Milly, who
bounced up, and took it with a frightened look; and he repeated, holding
her hand rather slightly I thought, 'Yes, I hope, very cordially,' and then
turning again to me, he put it over the arm of his chair, and let it go, as
a man might drop something he did not want from a carriage window.

Having made this apology for poor Milly, who was plainly bewildered, he
passed on, to her and my relief, to other topics, every now and then
expressing his fears that I was fatigued, and his anxiety that I should
partake of some supper or tea; but these solicitudes somehow seemed to
escape his remembrance almost as soon as uttered; and he maintained the
conversation, which soon degenerated into a close, and to me a painful
examination, respecting my dear father's illness and its symptoms, upon
which I could give no information, and his habits, upon which I could.

Perhaps he fancied that there might be some family predisposition to the
organic disease of which his brother died, and that his questions were
directed rather to the prolonging of his own life than to the better
understanding of my dear father's death.

How little was there left to this old man to make life desirable, and yet
how keenly, I afterwards found, he clung to it. Have we not all of us seen
those to whom life was not only _undesirable_, but positively painful--a
mere series of bodily torments, yet hold to it with a desperate and
pitiable tenacity--old children or young, it is all the same.

See how a sleepy child will put off the inevitable departure for bed. The
little creature's eyes blink and stare, and it needs constant jogging to
prevent his nodding off into the slumber which nature craves. His waking is
a pain; he is quite worn out, and peevish, and stupid, and yet he implores
a respite, and deprecates repose, and vows he is not sleepy, even to the
moment when his mother takes him in her arms, and carries him, in a sweet
slumber, to the nursery. So it is with us old children of earth and the
great sleep of death, and nature our kind mother. Just so reluctantly we
part with consciousness, the picture is, even to the last, so interesting;
the bird in the hand, though sick and moulting, so inestimably better than
all the brilliant tenants of the bush. We sit up, yawning, and blinking,
and stupid, the whole scene swimming before us, and the stories and music
humming off into th