“I am more than glad to have found you again. Not that I ever really lost you, for you have an eternal abiding-place in my mind and heart. Though I have forgotten much and wish I could forget still more of the rubbish of memory, neither you nor aught pertaining to you can be forgotten. You are not forgettable. But I am glad to be able to talk with you once more, although it be only on paper and across a continent. For me the end of the drama is near. I am in the last act, which has but few scenes. Life and death! what are they? We know as much of one as of the other, for we understand neither. We drop the question of whence because the imminent whither faces us and must be met, and dark enough it looms before us as we confront it at short range. Who can answer this cry of perplexed humanity? “I turn to you as I did in the past, and bade you decide whether I should go or stay. Now I have no choice but to go; yet tell me, shall I go with peace and trust into light, or must I lie down to be wrapped in darkness and silence forever? It is a time when my own strength is insufficient, and I reach out for the clasp of an assuring hand. “Is it strange that I turn to you for the help I need on this journey, which, though lonesome, is brief? It seems a natural thing to do. In all the years since I saw you, and have known nothing of you, when the way was uncertain, I always turned to you for guidance. I said to myself: ‘Would Cartice Hill wish me to do this?’ And I did that which I thought you would sanction. So you see you have been with me all the time. We have never been separated. “To me you are always young--young and full of courage and hope. I see you as I saw you last, a precious picture in my memory. The years that have passed since then are blown like a breath away. I am sitting beside you in the park again. I can almost touch your blue dress, and I hear the scratching of your parasol as you wrote with its tip on the ground. “The disease that was incipient in me in youth has been bravely baffled by this climate. I sometimes think it is the insidious agent that will ultimately destroy the human race. The end must come, however, even here, and I see that it is coming. “So tell me what life has taught you about death, if anything. No matter how hard and grim and fearsome the knowledge may be, I want to know it. Strange that although we devote our lives to learning, and many become vain of their acquirements, of this, the most important of all subjects, nobody knows anything, and nobody cares to learn till about to open the dread door.”