to be on March 1st, 1882. When .the despatch came
which reported him well and in good spirits, and on
his way down the Segama river, I remember our
delight; but I awoke in the night from a troubled
dream, with his voice in my ear. “ But here am I, all
alone, on an island of antimony,” were the strange
words he said.. I mention these things without attaching
any importance to them, but as curious matters,
and as incidents that my memory persists in registering.
His voice had been silenced for ever when I heard it
in my dream. I t could have had no spiritualistic
association with his death. Though, as I said, I am
not superstitious, my first “ hoping against hope”
arose in a fanciful reflection that so great was his love
for me, and mine for him, that if anything serious had
happened to him I should have felt it in some mysterious
way; that I should have seen him perhaps, as
the Corsican, in a play that had greatly delighted him,
saw his brother on the field of death. In these days I
find that I try to comfort myself with the reflection
that his last moments were not embittered by a thought
of u s ; that his death was too sudden for more than a
fleeting knowledge of his h u r t; th a t unconsciousness
instantly followed his exclamation, “ I am de ad ! ”—
that he died before he had time to think of the grief
his death would cause at home; and, therefore, that he
passed away happily.
The misery of such deaths falls to those who
are left behind. We know that we had been in
his mind. He had been in high spirits, with the
knowledge that he was within a few days of the
station where he would get letters from us. He was
also on his way to Silam, Sandakan Kudat, to collect
his things together, put up his diaries, pack his
geological and botanical specimens, and then “ homeward
bound.” He had met a young Englishman in
the interior some days before the end, and had been
talking of home, of Regent’s Park, of London; and we
knew that we had been in his thoughts, and possibly
were so up to a few minutes before his death. I t was
characteristic of him to have dreamy reveries; there
was often, as I have said,'an inspiration of “ far-away
thoughts” in his brown eyes. His mind may have
been busy with other scenes when he was struck down.
The hint of thoughtlessness in the use of his weapon
on this fatal day pictures him in my fancy marching
to his boat heedless of his surroundings. “ He met
with an accident,” writes one of his friends, “ which
might have occurred anywhere, and the kind of accident
that is common in the history of sport and travel all
over the world.”
One njght, in New York, a few months after his
death, I sat and listened while Dr. Fordyce Barker
explained to a little party after dinner the instant
collapse that follows on a person being shot through
the lungs.1 One has often to bear blows of this kind,
1 Dr. Fordyce Barker, who was intimate with Dickens, during that
illustrious author’s... visits to America, was one of the guests. He
started, among other subjects, a very interesting conversation.
“ Have you ever made studies of deaths for stage purposes 1 ” asked
Dr. Barker.
“ Ho.”
“ And yet your last moments of Mathias and of Louis XI. are
perfectly consistent and correct psychologically.”
“ My idea is to make death in these cases a characteristic Nemesis;
for example, Mathias dies of the fear of discovery; he is fatally
■haunted by the dread of being found out, and dies of it in a dream.
Louis pulls himself together by a great effort of will in his weakest phy