CHAPTER XIV. THE KING IS DEAD. Enormous wealth, power in the world of finance, every luxury that is at the command of man except health, that Jay Gould possessed. On Friday morning, December 3, 1892, at 9:15 o’clock, his wonderful career was ended. It was a perfect December morning when the soul of the magnate went to the undiscovered country, whither it had been trending for so many months. He died, not as he had feared to die, by the hand of the assassin or the dynamite crank, but as peacefully as any babe whose lamp of life has dwindled to a spark ere it flickers and goes out. He died surrounded by his children, in the plain, rear-extension bedroom, with its window looking down upon the conservatory. It was the room in which his wife died before him, and which he had since occupied whenever he was in the city. It led to the little study where only his most intimate friends were admitted. Here the last remnant of his strength ebbed away, and even while an attendant turned him, he was gone, and $100,000,000 were without a master. All the members of his family were at his bedside. There were George J. Gould and his wife, who was Edith Kingdon. There were Edwin Gould and the young woman, Dr. Shrady’s daughter, to whom he was so lately married. There was Miss Helen Miller Gould, named after her mother, who had taken her mother’s place as head of her father’s household. There were Miss Anna and Howard and Frank Gould, the younger children, and there, too, was Dr. John P. Munn, Jay Gould’s medical adviser. Mr. Gould’s sons and daughters had remained by his side until one o’clock the previous morning. Then he fell asleep, and his children, worn out, went to bed. They were around his bed again very early. There lay the Alexander of speculation, the man who sought new financial worlds to conquer, who founded possessions on ruins and wrecks--there lay that man, helpless, weak as a baby. Always physically frail, the wasting disease with which he had suffered had greatly emaciated him. His nose was pinched, his face, half hidden by his grey-black beard, was almost as white as the pillow on which it rested. His hands were like wax, and his languid eyes, dimmed by the shadows that were falling across his brain, moved lazily here and there. For although he had fallen into a stupor during the night, Jay Gould was conscious in the morning. He knew he was about to die. He knew the moment was near that he had fought to delay, fought not through fear of death, but with a mighty pride that abhorred the thought that even death should overthrow him.