Such an experience was indeed well calculated to damp a child’s high spirits, and it remains with me as the most vivid recollection of my youth. For accustomed as I was to sickness and suffering, death I was yet unacquainted with. And now, all at once, I was to see someone die! But what a radiant, blissful death that was! The evening before she passed away, grandmamma seemed positively transfigured. A rapturous expression was on her face, as she lay there stretching out her arms towards something that was seen by her alone, and repeating with marked emphasis the words “at four o’clock!” For many hours we all sat or knelt round her bed, until at last my mother sent me away to get a little sleep, promising to have me awakened when the end approached. I stopped to press my lips once more to the dear wasted hand, and at that grandmamma opened her eyes, looked at me and smiled, and her lips shaped themselves as if to give me a kiss. My eyes were running over with tears, as I stooped over her for that last kiss. Even then, almost in her death-agony, her natural sweetness and affability never deserted her for a moment, and as with her failing eyes she caught sight of a doctor who had been summoned in haste, with one of her own peculiarly graceful gestures she pointed to a chair by her bedside, begging him to be seated. Meanwhile, in the next room, still, in my little dressing-gown I had thrown myself on a camp-bedstead that had been placed there for anyone able to snatch a few minutes’ rest, and had fallen into an uneasy sleep, until a little before four o’clock my mother woke me, everyone thinking that the end must come then.