"About time for a man to rationally expect such a thing as death," I thought, and went away to another house, where a young married couple lived. "Isn't it perfectly ghastly?" said the wife. "Mr. Strangeways died last night." "So I heard," said I. "Well, he had lived his life." "Yes, but it was such a shockingly short illness. Why, only three weeks ago he was walking about the street." And she looked nervously at her husband, as though she expected him to give up the ghost at any minute. Then I gathered, with the knowledge of the length of his sickness, that her grief was not for the late Mr. Strangeways, and went away thinking over men and women I had known who would have given a thousand years in Purgatory for even a week wherein to arrange their affairs, and who were anything but well off. I passed on to a third house full of children, and the shadow of death hung over their heads, for father and mother were talking of Mr. Strangeway's "end." "Most shocking," said they. "It seems that his wife was in the next room when he was dying, and his only son called her, so she just had time to take him in her arms before he died. He was unconscious at the last. Wasn't it awful?" When I went away from that house I thought of men and women without a week wherein to arrange their affairs, and without any money, who were anything but unconscious at the last, and who would have given a thousand years in Purgatory for one glimpse at their mothers, their wives or their husbands. I reflected how these people died tended by hirelings and strangers, and I was not in the least ashamed to say that I laughed over Mr. Strangeways' death as I entered the house of a brother in his craft. "Heard of Strangeways' death?" said he. "Most hideous thing. Why, he had only a few days before got news of his designs being accepted by the Burgoyne Cathedral. If he had lived he would have been working out the details now--with me." And I saw that this man's fear also was not on account of Mr. Strangeways. And I thought of men and women who had died in the midst of wrecked work; then I sought a company of young men and heard them talk of the dead. "That's the second death among people I know within the year," said one. "Yes, the second death," said another. I smiled a very large smile. "And you know," said a third, who was the oldest of the party, "they've opened the new road by the head of Tresillion Road, and the wind blows straight across that level square from the Parks. Everything is changing about us." "He was an old man," I said. "Ye-es. More than middle-aged," said they. "And he outlived his reputation?" "Oh, no, or how would he have taken the designs for the Burgoyne Cathedral? Why, the very day he died...." "Yes," said I. "He died at the end of a completed work--his design finished, his prize awarded?" "Yes; but he didn't live to...." "And his illness lasted seventeen days, of twenty-four hours each?" "Yes."