"I will only add that the honourable names on this Record give me this further delight, that they are to me a pledge that Sanitary Improvement will go on. They thus bear their testimony to their sense of its importance, and they, from their position and character, can ensure its progress. The first labourers in this work may not be permitted to complete it,--they seldom are in any great work; but, whoever may have the satisfaction of completing it, that work--whatever obstacles may retard, whatever short-sighted and short-lived interests may oppose it, however it may seem for a while not to advance--_that work will be done_; and the time will come when not only the professional man and the educator, but the legislator, the statesman, the general, the minister of religion--in a word, every one to whom is entrusted the care, the guidance, and the control of numbers, will feel ashamed to be ignorant, and indeed will be accounted unfit for his office if he be ignorant, of the laws of human health and life." Yes! That his work had lived and would live, this was what he cared for. This it was that kept him uniformly brave and bright, and made him say to me one evening in tones of grateful joy--we were sitting on the wide balcony watching the moon rise over the fir-tree tops, his hand in mine as of old,-- "I have indeed succeeded! I have lived to see seven millions of the public money expended on this great cause. If any one had told me, when I began, that this would be, I should have considered it absolutely incredible." Footnote 24: Epidemics considered with relation to their Common Nature and to Climate and Civilisation. Published by Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh, 1856. Footnote 25: See Appendix II., p. 164. CHAPTER X. THE SUNSET OF LIFE--ITALY, 1861. My grandfather had travelled abroad but little during his strenuous life. He had, it is true, been to Paris in 1850, accompanied by Mr Charles Macaulay, Dr John Sutherland, and Mr (afterwards Sir Henry) Rawlinson, on business connected with the General Board of Health scheme for extra-mural sepulture, but, except on that occasion, he had not left England. So that when in 1857 he was asked to join a party of three proceeding to Milan for the purpose of examining the irrigation works of that city, he gladly undertook the journey, which was to lead them _viâ_ Marseilles and along the Cornice Road, then traversed by carriage only. The beauty of Italy thus came before him with full freshness at the age of seventy, and he returned strengthened and invigorated. The following year my grandfather lost his wife. She died at The Pines, at Weybridge, after a short illness, in the summer of 1858.