pless night almost invariably followed.

At twenty-seven, Wilson was lecturing ten, eleven, or more hours
weekly, usually with setons or open blister-wounds upon him--his
"bosom friends," he used to call them. He felt the shadow of death
upon him, and he worked as if his days were numbered. "Don't be
surprised," he wrote to a friend, "if any morning at breakfast you
hear that I am gone." But while he said so, he did not in the least
degree indulge in the feeling of sickly sentimentality. He worked on
as cheerfully and hopefully as if in the very fullness of strength.
"To none," said he, "is life so sweet as to those who have lost all
fear of dying."

Sometimes he was compelled to desist from his labors by sheer
debility, occasioned by loss of blood from the lungs; but after a few
weeks' rest and change of air, he would return to his work, saying,
"The water is rising in the well again!" Though disease had fastened
on his lungs, and was spreading there, and though suffering from a
distressing cough, he went on lecturing as usual. To add to his
troubles, when one day endeavoring to recover himself from a stumble
occasioned by his lameness, he overstrained his arm, and broke the
bone near the shoulder. But he recovered from his successive
accidents and illnesses in the most extraordinary way. The reed bent,
but did not break; the storm passed, and it stood erect as before.

There was no worry, nor fever, nor fret about him; but instead,
cheerfulness, patience and unfailing perseverance. His mind, amidst
all his sufferings, remained perfectly calm and serene. He went about
his daily work with an apparently charmed life, as if he had the
strength of many men in him. Yet all the while he knew he was dying,
his chief anxiety being to conceal his state from those about him at
home, to whom the knowledge of his actual condition would have been
inexpressibly distressing. "I am cheerful among strangers," he said,
"and try to live day by day as a dying man."

He went on teaching as before--lecturing to the Architectural
Institutes and to the School of Arts. One day, after a lecture before
the latter institute, he lay down to rest, and was shortly awakened
by the rupture of a blood-vessel, which occasioned him the loss of a
considerable quantity of blood. He did not experience the despair and
agony that Keats did on a like occasion, though he equally knew that
the messenger of death had come, and was waiting for him. He appeared