lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I
shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the
sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why.
My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper
will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping
that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed
at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep
on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense
of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make
a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there
is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let
me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content. Agony of pain
and suffocation--and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly
brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the
light of the morning through my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth
after the frosty air--will darkness close over them for ever?

Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing on
and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always
with a sense of moving onward . . .

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength
in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully
unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to
trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of
meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead:
it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living only from whom
men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard
east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only
opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid