Mr. Kingsley was ill of pleurisy for some time in California. He began to long for home. "I am very homesick," he writes to his wife, "and counting the days till I can get back to you." He returned to Eversley in August, and, as there was much sickness, began at once his self-sacrificing ministrations. He preached his last sermon in the Abbey Nov. 29, with great fervor. Dec. 3 he and his wife went to Eversley, where she was taken very ill. When told that there was no hope for her, he said, "My own death-warrant was signed with those words." He cared for her tenderly, and on Dec. 28 was stricken with pneumonia. He had been warned that he must not leave his room, as a change of temperature would prove fatal; but one day he sprang out of bed, came to his wife's room for a few moments, and, taking her hand in his, said, "This is heaven, don't speak;" but soon a severe fit of coughing came on: he went back to his bed, and they never met again. A correspondence was kept up for a few days in pencil, but this became too painful. Towards the last he said, "No more fighting--no more fighting," and then he prayed earnestly. Again he murmured, "How beautiful God is!" For two days he sent no messages to his wife, thinking that she had gone before him. He said to the nurse who cared for them both, "I, too, am come to an end; it is all right--all as it _should be_." His last words were the Burial Service, "Shut not Thy merciful ears to our prayers ... suffer us not, at our last hour, from any pains of death, to fall from Thee." On Jan. 23, 1875, without a struggle, his life went out. Dean Stanley telegraphed, "The Abbey is open to the Canon and the Poet;" but Kingsley had said, "Go where I will in this hard-working world, I shall take care to get my last sleep in Eversley churchyard;" and under the fir-trees he was buried. A great crowd of all classes stood around that open grave, and later, little children who had loved the "Water-babies" came often and laid flowers upon the mound. "Few eyes were dry," says Max Müller, "when he was laid in his own gravel bed, the old trees which he had planted and cared for waving their branches to him for the last time.... He will be mourned for, yearned for, in every place in which he passed some days of his busy life." A Memorial Fund was at once raised by friends in England and America. Eversley church was enlarged and improved; at Chester a prize was founded in connection with the Natural History Society; a marble bust of him placed in the Cathedral Chapter-house, and a stall restored in the Cathedral, which bears his name. In Westminster Abbey a marble bust of Kingsley, by Mr. Woolner, was unveiled Sept. 23, 1875, with appropriate services. Mrs. Kingsley survived her husband sixteen years, dying at Leamington, Dec. 12, 1891, at the age of seventy-seven.