I died. I've died before, for money. Same as I've slept for thirty days. But it's not a pleasing pastime. Not the kind of thing I should recommend to any gentleman who's looking for some agreeable occupation with which to fill up his spare time. Especially when you have to ready yourself for it in two or three hours, as I had then. By the time you are ready you feel as if it was going to be a case of genuine death at last. I know I did. Then I had got up the game so thoroughly that I had to cling on to life by my eyelids. The show was artistically a success; though, while it lasted, I kept thinking of the Chinaman from whom I'd learnt the trick. For reasons of his own--most of them connected with the police--that ingenious yellow terror was constantly finding it convenient to slip his cable. Once, as I'd cause for knowing, he slipped it so well that it parted for ever. As I lay that Monday afternoon, with the various members of the noble house of Twickenham standing by my bed of suffering, the memory of that Chinaman came back more clearly than I liked, and I devoutly hoped that I wasn't going to follow his example. It had been my original intention to prolong the agony, and to keep on dying for a day or two. There were a good many little hints I wanted to pick up from the members of my family. But the agony turned out to be so very real that the idea of prolonging it didn't appeal to me one little bit. So we had to part before we'd really met; and I had to postpone, until after my death, the acquirement of the information I stood so much in need of. It was not surprising that the old fossil of a doctor announced that I was dead; for I had done the thing so extremely well, and was in such a state of collapse, that I myself wasn't sure I wasn't. My experiences, on that occasion, by no means terminated with my decease. It's an odd sensation to be 'laid out' by a lady of a certain age and peculiar habits. It's a funny thing to be measured for your coffin. It's a still funnier one to be placed inside it. And it was when I was placed inside it that one of the not least difficult and delicate parts of the game began.