be much more of it.

It is a week since I wrote the above, and now I take up my pen
for the last time, for I know that the end is at hand. My brain
is still clear and I can manage to write, though with difficulty.
The pain in my lung, which has been very bad during the last
week, has suddenly quite left me, and been succeeded by a feeling
of numbness of which I cannot mistake the meaning. And just
as the pain has gone, so with it all fear of that end has departed,
and I feel only as though I were going to sink into the arms
of an unutterable rest. Happily, contentedly, and with the same
sense of security with which an infant lays itself to sleep in
its mother's arms, do I lay myself down in the arms of the Angel
Death. All the tremors, all the heart-shaking fears which have
haunted me through a life that seems long as I looked back upon
it, have left me now; the storms have passed, and the Star of
our Eternal Hope shines clear and steady on the horizon that
seems so far from man, and yet is so very near to me tonight.

And so this is the end of it -- a brief space of troubling,
a few restless, fevered, anguished years, and then the arms of
that great Angel Death. Many times have I been near to them,
and now it is my turn at last, and it is well. Twenty-four hours
more and the world will be gone from me, and with it all its
hopes and all its fears. The air will close in over the space
that my form filled and my place know me no more; for the dull
breath of the world's forgetfulness will first dim the brightness
of my memory, and then blot it out for ever, and of a truth I
shall be dead. So is it with us all. How many millions have
lain as I lie, and thought these thoughts and been forgotten!
-- thousands upon thousands of years ago they thought them, those
dying men of the dim past; and thousands on thousands of years
hence will their descendants think them and be in their turn
forgotten. 'As the breath of the oxen in winter, as the quick
star that runs along the sky, as a little shadow that loses itself
at sunset,' as I once heard a Zulu called Ignosi put it, such
is the order of our life, the order that passeth away.

Well, it is not a good world -- nobody can say that it is, save
those who wilfully blind themselves to facts. How can a world
be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-interest
the guiding star? The wonder is not that it is so bad, but that
there should be any good left in it