oward the problem of suffering
and death, an attitude so full of the human qualities of wonder,
sympathy, tenderness, and trust, that he could scarcely view them
without exhibiting the emotion he felt. He was a constant student of the
phenomena of dissolution, and in one instance calmly declared it as his
belief that when a man was dead he was dead and that was the end of him,
consciously. At other times he modified his view to one of an almost
prayerful hope, and in reading Emily Bronte's somewhat morbid story of
"Wuthering Heights," his copy of which I long had in my possession, I
noted that he had annotated numerous passages relative to death and a
future life with interesting comments of his own. To one of these
passages, which reads:

"I don't know if it be a peculiarity with me, but I am seldom
otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death,
provided no frenzied or despairing mourner shares the duty with
me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I
feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the
eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its
duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness,"

he had added on the margin:

"How often I have felt this very emotion. How natural I know it to
be. And what a consolation in the thought!"

Writing a final prescription for a young clergyman who was dying, and
for whom he had been most tenderly solicitous, he added to the list of
drugs he had written in Latin, the lines:

"In life's closing hour, when the trembling soul flies
And death stills the heart's last emotion,
Oh, then may the angel of mercy arise
Like a star on eternity's ocean!"

When he himself was upon his death-bed he greeted his old friend Colonel
Dyer--he of the absent overcoat and over-shoes--with:

"Dyer, I'm almost gone. I am in the shadow of death. I am standing upon
the very brink. I cannot see clearly, I cannot speak coherently, the
film of death obstructs my sight. I know what this means. It is the end,
but all is well with me. I have no fear. I have said and done things
that would have been better left unsaid and undone, but I have never
willfully wronged a man in my life. I have no concern for myself. I am
concerned only for those I leave behind. I never saved money, and I die
as poor as when I was born. We do not know what there is in the future
now shut out from our