Richard now took an immense dislike to our house in Trieste, where we had been over ten years. The fact is, I had increased it in my ambition to twenty-seven rooms, and just as I had made it perfection, he wanted to leave it. Certainly Providence directed, for shortly after that, the drainage got so very bad there as to be incurable, and after he got really ill, and his heart weak, it would have been impossible for him to mount the hundred and twenty steps, four stories high, to go in and out. We ransacked the whole of Trieste, but there was only one house that suited us in any way, and there was not the least likelihood of our being able to get it, as it was occupied; but, curiously to say, six months later we _did_ get it, and got housed in it the following July. On the 24th of February we had a great shock in the death of poor Reich, our fencing-master. He went out well dressed, with a cigar in his mouth, very early, took a walk in the Via Riborgo, mounted some steps, put a pistol to his head, and blew his brains out. Some people ran, hearing the pistol; he was quite dead, but his cigar was still alight. Suicide is the commonest thing in the world in Trieste; nobody takes any account of it. The fact is that he had been getting into bad health. An Italian fencing-master had set up in the town, and got all his best Italian pupils away. I had not fenced at all the winter 1882-3, and Richard, of course, had been away so much and had had many twinges of gout, and therefore it was a matter of great reproach to us that we had not gone and paid him visits, and cheered him up, and looked after him--so often a little friendship prevents a man from going to this extremity. Richard felt it for a long time. Reich was a Bohemian and an old trooper, and Richard said he was the best broadswordsman he had ever seen. He has frequently told me to stand steady, and he has made a _moulinet_ at me; you could hear the sword swish in the air, and he has touched my face like a fly in the doing of it. He did it frequently to show what he _could_ do, but he used to say that he would not do it to any of his men pupils, for fear they should flinch either one way or the other, which would of course have cut their faces open; but he knew I should stand steady. I liked that.