The death-scene of the emperor was an event which must interest every reader. Upon his return from a hunting excursion into Hungary, he was attacked, on Thursday evening, October 16th, by slight indisposition, which was supposed to have been caused by eating imprudently of mushrooms. His sickness, baffling the skill of the doctors, increased, and by Saturday night became alarming. On Tuesday it was thought that he was dying. The pope’s nuncio administered to him the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. His majesty manifested great composure in view of the sublime change before him, and said to one who was weeping at his bedside, “I am not afraid in contemplating the dread tribunal before which I must now so soon appear. I am certain of my cause. Look at me! A man that is certain of his cause can enter on such a journey with good courage and a composed mind.” To his physicians, who were doubtful respecting the nature of his disease, he said, “If Doctor Gazelli were here you would soon know what is my complaint. As it is, you will only learn after you have dissected me.” He then requested to be shown the cup in which his heart would be placed after that operation. His daughter, Maria Theresa, who had married the Grand-duke Francis, was in a delicate state of health. The death of her father would place the weighty crown upon her youthful brow. Grief and agitation threw her helpless upon her bed. So important was her life to the world that the emperor was unwilling that, in her then condition, she should enter the death-chamber. “Tell my Theresa,” said he, in faint and dying accents, “that I bless her, notwithstanding her absence.” The empress had fainted away at the bedside, and had been borne, in the arms of the attendants, into her daughter Maria Theresa’s chamber. She was now summoned, with the younger children, for the final adieu. As the empress, almost delirious with grief, re-entered the apartment, she threw herself upon the bed of her dying husband, and exclaimed, in frenzied tones, “Do not leave me! Do not leave me!” During all the day of Wednesday weeping friends stood around the bed, as the lamp of life flickered in its socket. Every moment it was expected that the emperor would breathe his last. At two o’clock the next morning the spirit took its flight, and the lifeless clay alone remained. The grief-stricken empress closed the eyes of her departed husband, kissed his hands, and “was carried out more dead than alive.” Thus ended the male line of the house of Hapsburg, after five centuries of royal sway. The emperor died on the 20th of October 1740, in the fifty-sixth year of his age.