and which he hastened to take, for out he came through the bushes,
and though his face was very pale, there was an odd twist
about the corners of his mouth that reassured me.

This must have happened quite at the end of my grandfather's life,
for almost immediately afterwards, as it now seems to me, he died before he
need have done because he would eat crab, a dish that never agreed with him,
in the face of his doctor's warning that if he did he would surely die.
"What! am I to be conquered by crabs?" he demanded indignantly of the doctor;
for apart from loving them with all his heart he had never yet been conquered
by anything." Nay, sir, the combat is too unequal--do not, I pray you,
try it again," replied the doctor. But my grandfather ordered crabs that
very night for supper, and went in to table with the shining eyes of one
who is determined to conquer or die, and the crabs conquered, and he died.
"He was a just man," said the neighbours, except that nearest neighbour,
formerly his best friend, "and might have been a great one had he so chosen."
And they buried him with profound respect, and the sunshine came into our
home life with a burst, and the birds were not the only creatures that sang,
and the arbour, from having been a temple of Delphic utterances, sank into
a home for slugs.

Musing on the strangeness of life, and on the invariable
ultimate triumph of the insignificant and small over the important
and vast, illustrated in this instance by the easy substitution
in the arbour of slugs for grandfathers, I went slowly round
the next bend of the path, and came to the broad walk along
the south side of the high wall dividing the flower garden
from the kitchen garden, in which sheltered position my father
had had his choicest flowers. Here the cousins had been at work,
and all the climbing roses that clothed the wall with beauty