o the great
beyond. In a letter addressed to his friends shortly afterwards,
Lloyd Osbourne gives us the details of these last moments:

"At sunset he came downstairs, rallied his wife about the forebodings
she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing tour to America that he
was eager to make, 'as he was now so well,' and played a game of cards
with her to drive away her melancholy. He said he was hungry; begged
her assistance to help him make a salad for the evening meal; and to
enhance the little feast he brought up a bottle of old Burgundy from
the cellar. He was helping his wife on the veranda, and gaily talking,
when suddenly he put both hands to his head and cried out: 'What's
that?' Then he asked quickly: 'Do I look strange?' Even as he did so,
he fell on his knees beside her." Just as he had leaned upon her for
help, comfort, and advice for so many years of his life, so it was at
her feet that he sank in death when the last swift summons came. He
was helped into the great hall between his wife and his body servant,
Sosimo, and at ten minutes past eight the same evening, Monday,
December 3, 1894, he passed away.

Her great task was finished, and she sat with folded hands in the
quiet house from which the soul had fled; but, although the lightning
suddenness of the blow made it almost a crushing one, the bitterness
of her grief was greatly softened by her firm belief in a life beyond
the grave and the certainty of a reunion with him there.

She bore this supreme sorrow with the same silent fortitude with which
she had always met trouble, but a subtle change came over her. While
it could not be said that she looked exactly old, yet the youthfulness
for which she had been so remarkable seemed suddenly to vanish, and
her hair grew rapidly grey. A little child--Frank Norris's
daughter--said, with an acuteness beyond her years: "Tamaitai smiles
with her lips, but not with her eyes."

Among the hundreds of letters of condolence which she received from
all over the world, none, perhaps, came more directly from the heart
than that written by her old friend, Henry James from which I have
taken the following extracts:

"My dear Fanny Stevenson:

"What can I say to you that will not seem cruelly irrelevant or vain?
We have been sitting in darkness for nearly a fortnight, but what is
_our_ darkness to the extinction of your magnificent light? You will
probably know in some degree what has happened to us--how the hide