Seriously speaking, when your time comes--I hope this makes nobody uncomfortable, but I never can understand why one should shirk the subject instead of regarding it with the interest and curiosity it naturally inspires--when your time goes, rather, and leaves you confronted with that vast eternity so full of unimaginably agreeable possibilities, which of all the parts and members that make up you, shall you be most sorry to relinquish? I do not refer to obscure organs such as the heart and lungs, which you never notice except when they are giving trouble, but the willing agents by which you keep in touch with the world. I am very fond of them all, I am so accustomed to their ways and they know so exactly what I like; I could not dismiss any of them without regret, but I find degrees in the distressful anticipation. One’s eyes, for instance, have given one more and keener pleasure certainly, than any other organ; but I could close my eyes. One’s ears have registered all the voices one loves, and the sound of rain and the wind among the pines, but there is such a din in this world besides that very gladly I could close my ears. One’s feet have been most willing servitors, but one sees so little of them--would you recognize a photograph of your own foot? For me it is the most grievous thing to think that one will be obliged to abandon one’s hands. One’s hands are more than servants, they are friends. One holds them in respect and admiration and personal affection, and in the end is not what we write upon them the very summing-up of ourselves? And from the first spoon they carry to our infant lips to the adult irritation they work off by tapping on the table how much they have done for one! Above all things I shall miss my hands if I have to do without them, and I shall be profoundly resentful, though I may not show it, when somebody else takes the liberty of folding them for me. Thisbe, coming out to say that she has neuralgia, and will I ever come in to tea, demands to know what I have written there. I shall not tell Thisbe; it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples. Moreover, she would report it to Tiglath-Pileser, and they would take measures; I should be lucky to get off with an iron tonic. “Nothing about you, Thisbe.” But in order to ascertain what I really have said about her,--she has a hatred of publicity and I have to be very careful,--she goes privily when I am immersed in tea, and possesses herself of the whole. “But you are not going to die,” she exclaimed with dismay and disapproval. “We have made quite other arrangements. You can’t possibly die, now.” “Not immediately, in so far as I am aware,” I respond. “But there is no harm in looking forward to it a little,--on a day like this.” CHAPTER VII