In December of that same year the last letter he is known to have written was received by his daughter. It is dated from Chihuahua, and mentions casually that he has attached himself unofficially to a division of Villa's army, and speaks of a prospective advance on Ojinaga. No further word has ever come from or of Ambrose Bierce. Whether illness overtook him, then an old man of seventy-one, and death suddenly, or whether, preferring to go foaming over a precipice rather than to straggle out in sandy deltas, he deliberately went where he knew death was, no one can say. His last letters, dauntless, grave, tender, do not say, though they suggest much. "You must try to forgive my obstinacy in not 'perishing' where I am," he wrote as he left Washington. "I want to be where something worth while is going on, or where nothing whatever is going on." "Good-bye--if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico--ah, that is euthanasia!" Whatever end Ambrose Bierce found in Mexico, the lines of George Sterling well express what must have been his attitude in meeting it: "Dream you he was afraid to live? Dream you he was afraid to die? Or that, a suppliant of the sky, He begged the gods to keep or give? Not thus the shadow-maker stood, Whose scrutiny dissolved so well Our thin mirage of Heaven or Hell-- The doubtful evil, dubious good.... "If now his name be with the dead, And where the gaunt agaves flow'r, The vulture and the wolf devour The lion-heart, the lion-head, Be sure that heart and head were laid In wisdom down, content to die; Be sure he faced the Starless Sky Unduped, unmurmuring, unafraid." In any consideration of the work of Ambrose Bierce, a central question must be why it contains so much that is trivial or ephemeral. Another question facing every critic of Bierce, is why the fundamentally original point of view, the clarity of workmanship of his best things--mainly stories--did not win him immediate and general recognition. A partial answer to both questions is to be found in a certain discord between Bierce and his setting. Bierce, paradoxically, combined the bizarre in substance, the severely restrained and compressed in form. An ironic mask covered a deep-seated sensibility; but sensibility and irony were alike subject to an uncompromising truthfulness; he would have given deep-throated acclaim to Clough's "But play no tricks upon thy soul, O man, Let truth be truth, and life the thing it can."