"Wait," said Stainton. He put aside his extinguished cigar and resumed: "One by one I saw my father's powers fade. I could check them off as they went; powers we are all so used to that we don't know how dependent we are on them: niceties of the palate, differentiation between pleasant odours and unpleasant, delicacies of sight, distinctness of hearing, steadiness, the control of muscles that we are normally unconscious of controlling. These things go, slowly--very slowly--in each of us, and when they are gone, even when they are partly gone, when we never guess that they are gone, but when people about us detect our condition and comment on it, without our so much as dreaming of it----" He stopped again, and again went on: "Then there's Death," he said, with an abrupt change. "Did you ever see anybody die, Holt?" Holt shook his bald head. He did not like this sort of thing. "No," he admitted. "Not your parents?" "No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my first trip abroad." "Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk about the dignity and serenity and nobility of death. Nothing to that. Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees: it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.--There is no dignity in terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father----I was looking towards him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I remember the queer gurgle and the---- "Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old age? I lay awake nights, I tell you--nights and nights--interminable nights, thinking, shaking. "It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There was a girl--it was a good many years ago, and I had just graduated from Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day, when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into the cold black water we both went. "It seemed to me that I was hours going down--down, and that I was still longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking again, and just then she--the girl I was in love with--flung an arm toward me. I shoved her away.