In November a letter from Sir Paget told me of Lord Dundrannan’s death, at which, by chance, he was himself present; evidently moved by the scene, he recounted it with more detail than he was wont to indulge in. Hearing that his neighbor was worse, he went to inquire; as he stood at the door, Nina drove up in her car—she had been out for an airing—and took him into the library where her father was, sitting in a chair by the fire. It was very rarely that he would consent to keep his bed, and he had insisted on getting up that day. “Godfrey Frost was there” (my uncle wrote) “and Dr. Napier, standing and whispering together in the window. By the sick man sat an old white-haired Wesleyan minister, whom he had sent for all the way from Bradford, where he himself was born: he had ‘sat under’ this old gentleman as a boy, and a few days before had expressed a great longing to see him. The minister was reading the Bible to him now. It looked as though he had foreseen that the end was coming. He had had a sort of valedictory talk with Nina and young Frost a week before—about the money and the businesses, what they were to do, what rules they were to be guided by, and so on. That done, he appeared to dismiss worldly affairs, this world itself, from his thoughts, and ‘took up’ the next. I am not mocking; yet I can hardly help smiling. He seemed to have ‘taken it up’ in the same way that he would have inquired into a new, important and interesting speculation; and he got his expert—the old minister from Bradford—to advise him. He was not afraid, or agitated, or remorseful; his feelings seemed, so far as his impaired speech enabled him to describe them to his family, those of a curious and earnest interest in his prospects of survival—he eagerly desired to survive—and in what awaited him if he did survive. The fact that he had neglected religion for a great many years back did not trouble him; nor did ‘How hardly shall a rich man——’ He seemed confident that, if immortality were a fact, some place and some work would be found for Jonathan Frost. Whether it was a fact was what he wanted to know; he hated the idea of nothingness, of inactivity, of stopping!