And yet, now, I can recall the cold shudder that passed through my young veins when my Grandmother died. Of all days, too, that the Thirtieth of January should have been ordered for her passing away! It was mid-winter, and the streets were white with Innocent Snow when she was taken ill. She had not been one of those trifling and trivanting gentlewomen that pull diseases on to their pates with drums and routs, and late hours, and hot rooms, and carding, and distilled waters. She had ever been of a most sober conversation and temperate habit; so that the prodigious age she reached became less of a wonder, and the tranquillity with which her spirit left this darksome house of clay seemed mercifully natural. They had noticed, so early as the autumn of '19, that she was decaying; yet had the roots of life stricken so strongly into earth as to defy that Woodman who pins his faith to shaking blasts at first, but when he finds that windfalls will not serve his turn, and that although leaves decay, and branches are swept away, and the very bark is stripped off, the tree dies not, takes heart of grace, and lays about him with his Axe. Then one blow with the sharp suffices. So for many months Death seemed to let her be, as though he sat down quietly by her side, nursing his bony chin, and saying, "She is very old and weak; yet a little, and she must surely be mine." Mistress Talmash appeared to me, in the fantastic imagination of a solitary childhood, to take such a part, and play it to the Very Death; and there were sidelong glances from her eyes, and pressures of her lips, and a thrusting forth of her hands when the cordial or the potion was to be given, that seemed to murmur, "Still does she Tarry, and still do I Wait." This gentlewoman was never hard or impatient with my Grandmother; but towards the closing scene, for all the outward deference she observed towards her, 'twas she who commanded, and the Unknown Lady who obeyed. Nor did I fail to mark that her bearing was towards me fuller of a kind of stern authority than she had of aforetime presumed to show, and that she seemed to be waiting for me too, that she might work her will upon me.