Our early youth, for which death scarcely exists, knows nothing of the value of days. It thinks our strength inexhaustible and squanders it idly. When we begin to see, around us and in us, the charm and the sadness of transient things, we feel life in all its fulness because we are amazed at the incessant flight of time. Our days are numbered. But the divisions of time are purely conventional. How many days do we lose when again the fervor of life concentrates itself in a few minutes of consciousness? The last minutes that we are destined to live may be the most intense. They may become an important part of our existence if we know that they are the last. They have this tremendous power of summing up in themselves all our past days, of completing the design of our life, of defining its outlines, and sometimes of revealing them for the first time. They bring us the supreme opportunity to correct our faults, to perform the most imperative duties which we have forgotten, to mark the current of our thoughts which has been running to waste in our ordinary pursuits. What right has anyone to steal these minutes from us? It is indeed to steal them, if they are left to us, stripped of their real importance. The man who is about to die should act like a man who is about to die, not as a man who has plenty of time left. You think, you doctors, to soothe him by hiding his danger from him; you take away from him a part of his life whose importance could never be measured in duration. He will waste his remaining strength, if he has kept his mind intact, in guessing at the truth, in scrutinising the blank faces around him, in questioning the throbs of his pulse, the beating of his heart. He will be a prey to all the terrors of doubt, when he has the right to finish his life by preparing for death. By what right do you still decree that the question of his bequest alone shall occupy him? What do you know of his thoughts, of his soul, of the future life, of God? Who has solved these questions? And if you have solved them for yourselves, where do you find the authority to solve them for others? Do not take useless responsibilities on yourselves. Everyone has his own, and that is sufficient. It is not for you to set yourselves up as judges, to ask if the dying man has any affairs to settle--he may have some of which you know nothing--you have no right to choose your confidant, and to be inhuman and cruel. For it is not human to injure life by deforming it, and it does deform it to banish from it all thought of death, which gives it all its significance. A beautiful death is the indispensable complement of a beautiful life, and the ransom of a wicked one. Yes, we must raise ourselves above the fear of death, and for that we must begin to see life as it is, so that we may live bravely, fully, nobly. The fear of death is one with the fear of living, which makes us shrink from the great efforts, the boldness, and the sacrifices that life demands from us.