And though I cannot account for the fact, I have been much more sensible of this since a re-perusal of Genesis.――I wrote the foregoing not long after the receipt of your letter, but have been such a dawdle that I have not been able to collect materials for finishing it: and the circumstance which now at last helps me out is a melancholy one, no other than the decease of our friend and companion Johnny Raw:[34] who was taken off, some days since, in the staggers. There was something peculiarly doleful in the poor fellow’s exit; and there was a sort of dreariness diffused over all its circumstances, which set it off with almost a theatrical effect. As B[ob] says, it would have not been so much if he had wasted away by a long illness, or if he had heard of his death at a distance; but to have been using and admiring him till within a few days of his decease, to have watched all the stages of his rapid illness, seen him bled, given him his physic (which seemed to distress him very much, though all along the pain he suffered was evidently very great), and, after all, to have got up at two o’clock in the night, when the crisis was to take place, and come into the stable only a minute after his death, where we could just see him, by lantern-light, stretched out on the straw:――were incidents not calculated to excite pleasure. Add to this, it was one of those shivering cold stormy nights which make me feel as if I and the people with me were the only human beings in the world: a fact, by-the-by, which I am not yet sufficient psychologist to account for. And the next day, when we went out to bury him, the weather was just the same, and there was nothing to excite one cheerful association. Also, it was somewhat staggering to the speculatively inclined, not to be able to discover one single reason why he should not be able to gallop about as well as ever. He was evidently in good condition, his flesh hard, and his limbs sound: and why I should be able to walk any better than he, was more than I could elicit. We buried him under an elm tree in the lawn, and nailed his shoes to it for a monument.[35]