recommendation Bawcombe had been elected to fill the vacant place. The
letter from Salisbury informing him of his election and commanding his
presence in that city filled him with astonishment; for, though he was
sixty years old and the father of three sons now out in the world, he
could not yet regard himself as an old man, for he had never known a
day's illness, nor an ache, and was famed in all that neighbourhood for
his great physical strength and endurance. And now, with his own cottage
to live in, eight shillings a week, and his pensioners' garments, with
certain other benefits, and a shilling a day besides which his old
master paid him for some services at the farm-house in the village,
Isaac found himself very well off indeed, and he enjoyed his prosperous
state for twenty-six years. Then, in 1886, his old wife fell ill and
died, and no sooner was she in her grave than he, too, began to droop;
and soon, before the year was out, he followed her, because, as the
neighbours said, they had always been a loving pair and one could not
'bide without the other.

This chapter has already had its proper ending and there was no
intention of adding to it, but now for a special reason, which I trust
the reader will pardon when he hears it, I must go on to say something
about that strange phenomenon of death succeeding death in old married
couples, one dying for no other reason than that the other has died. For
it is our instinct to hold fast to life, and the older a man gets if he
be sane the more he becomes like a newborn child in the impulse to grip
tightly. A strange and a rare thing among people generally (the people
we know), it is nevertheless quite common among persons of the labouring
class in the rural districts. I have sometimes marvelled at the number
of such cases to be met with in the villages; but when one comes to
think about it one ceases to wonder that it should be so. For the
labourer on the land goes on from boyhood to the end of life in the same