I have noticed that since my illness began she has slipped into the use of little nursery phrases which I have not heard for years; I have become “Master Henry” again, and am told to “look slippy” about taking my medicine. This would have moved me in other days with a sense of pathos; it is not so now, though the knowledge that these two beloved, sweet-minded, loving women suffer, is the one shadow over my tranquillity. If I could only explain to them that my sadness for their sorrow is drowned in my wonder at the strangeness that any one should ever sorrow at all for anything! 38 _Sep. 22, 1900._ To-day I am calmer, and the hours have been passing in a long reverie; I have been thinking quietly over the past years. Sometimes, as I lay with eyes closed, the old life came so near me that it almost seemed as if men and women and children, some of them dead and gone, had sate by me and spoken to me; little scenes and groups out of early years that I thought I had forgotten suddenly shaped themselves. It is as if my will had abdicated its sway, and the mind, like one who is to remove from a house in which he had long dwelt, is turning over old stores, finding old relics long laid aside in cupboards and lumber-rooms, and seeing them without sorrow, only lingering with a kind of tender remoteness over the sweet and fragrant associations of the days that are dead. I have never doubted that I am to die, and to-day it seems as though I cared little when the parting comes; death does not seem to me now like a sharp close to life, the yawning of a dark pit; but, as in an allegory, I seem to see a little dim figure, leaving a valley full of sunlight and life, and going upwards into misty and shapeless hills. I used to wonder whether death was an end, an extinction—_now_ that seems impossible—my life and thought seem so strong, so independent of the frail physical accompaniments of the body; but even if it is an end, the thought does not afflict me. I am in the Father’s hands. It is He that hath made us. 39 _Sep. 24, 1900._ I have had an interview with her. I hardly know what we said—very little—she understood, and it was very peaceful in her presence. I tried to tell her not to be sorry; for indeed the one thing that seems to me inconceivable is that any one should grieve. I lie like a boat upon a quiet tide, drifting out to sea—the sea to which we must all drift. I am thankful for my life and all its sweetness; the shadows have gone, and it seems to me now as though all the happiness came from God, and all the shadow was of my own making. And the strangest thought of all is that the darkest shadow has always been this very passing which now seems to me the most natural thing in the world—indeed the only true thing.