So Miss Linthorpe had the services of her old, comfortable doctor: nor was she less exacting in the case of her solicitor; nor, I need hardly say, in the case of her clergyman. He had to come from a church several parishes off: “It’s a dingy sort of hole, and the services there always send me to sleep; but they’ve no stunts there, if you understand what I mean; they don’t turn out in fresh clothes every week, or make up the service as they go along.” I doubt if he did much for her, and indeed she confided to me that she would look a pretty sort of fool in heaven if all _he_ said was true. But she got her way, and she could bear anything as long as she got her way. It was the same clergyman who attended her coffin to the grave-side, and read the funeral service. “When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality” ... it was part of a dead world we laid to rest at the West Drayton cemetery, but you felt that there, if indeed she was anywhere, her old prejudices would be more respected, and her odd ways less out of place. It touched me profoundly, and at the same time took me seriously aback, when I found that the old lady had left me her sole heir. She had also, quite at the end of her life, entrusted to her solicitor a sealed packet which was to be delivered to me personally, or failing that to be destroyed unread. I do not know what strange freak induced my aunt to plunge suddenly into authorship; but the envelope proved to contain nothing more than her reflections on life, with a few general bits of advice which she offered to me on the strength of it. I have it before me as I type (Miss Linthorpe to her dying day would never use a typewriter): a few extracts, which I do not hesitate to print, will show the general character of it. MY DEAR OPAL, _When you grow old (as you probably will, for my family are long-lived, and the Winterheads are a healthy stock, because they think so little), you will have passed through an experience which now lies a good long way back in my life, but which will perhaps come to you later. I mean the moment when one drops out of the movement that goes on in one’s generation: it is just like dropping out of a competition, the same mixture of disappointment and relief. You will find that you have suddenly stood still, when you had no idea that you had been moving, like getting off one of these murderous moving platforms when you’re not thinking. You will have turned from a competitor in life into a spectator, and your first thought will be that everything round you changes, and changes very rapidly. But this, since it is not a very original thought, you will probably keep to yourself._