Except the directions to me for the expenditure of the five hundred dollars, the last two entries in the book were written on Christmas morning. One of these was the passage which smote me most when I first read it, for it struck me as sadness itself when written by a young man not yet twenty-five: "If we had nothing else to wish, we should at least wish to die." At the time I did not seize the full significance of the other passage, longer than this, and far sadder when its meaning was finally grasped. "The love our parents gave us we do not pay back, nor a tithe of it, even. We may bestow it to our children, but we never render it again to our father and our mother. And what can equal the love of a woman for the son she has borne? No peak is as lofty, and no ocean is as wide; it is fathomless, boundless, immeasurable; it is poured without stint, unceasing and unfailing. And how do we men meet it? We do not even make a pretense of repaying it, most of us. Now and again there may be a son here and there who does what he can for his mother, little as it is, and much as he may despise himself for doing it: and why not? Are there not seven swords in the heart of the Mater Dolorosa? And what sort of a son is he who would add another?" Although I had already begun to guess at the secret of my friend's conduct, a mystery to all others, it was the first of these two final entries in his note-book which came flashing back into my memory one evening toward the end of March, ten weeks or so after he had bidden me good-by and had gone away to Egypt. I was seated in my library, smoking, when there came a ring at the door, and a telegram was handed to me. I laid my cigar down on the brownish-yellow shell, at the crinkled edge of which the green frog was sitting, reaching out his broken arms for the trombone whereon he had played in happier days. I saw that the despatch had come by the cable under the ocean, and I wondered who on the other side of the Atlantic had news for me that would not keep till a letter could reach me. I tore open the envelope. The message was dated Alexandria, Egypt, and it was signed by my friend's widow. He had died that morning, and I was asked to break the news to his mother. (1893) [Illustration: On an Errand of Mercy] The ambulance clanged along, now under the elevated railroad, and now wrenching itself outside to get ahead of a cable-car. With his little bag in his hand, the young doctor sat wondering whether he would know just what to do when the time came. This was his first day of duty as ambulance surgeon, and now he was going to his first call. It was three in the afternoon of an August day, when the hot spell had lasted a week already, and yet the young physician was chill with apprehension as he took stock of himself, and as he had a realizing sense of his own inexperience.