The closing scene to poor Morrison came at last. He left his bed one day after an illness of nearly a week, and crawled out into the street to beg. A gentleman in passing dropped him a few coppers, and Morrison felt indignant that any one should have offered an artist less than silver. But on second thoughts he corrected himself. “Heaven help me!” he ejaculated, “I have been a fool all life long, and I am not wise yet!” He crept onwards along the pavement to the house of a gentleman whom he had known thirty years before. “I am dying,” he said, “and I am desirous that you should see my body laid decently under ground; I shall be dead in less than a week.” The gentleman promised to attend the funeral; Morrison crept back to his lodgings, and was dead in less than a day. Yonder he lies in the strangers’ corner; the parish furnished the shroud and the coffin, and the gentleman whom he had invited to his burial carried his head to the grave, and paid the sexton. There are few real stories consistently gloomy throughout. Nature delights in strange compounds of the _bizarre_ and the serious; and Morrison’s story, like some of the old English dramas that terminate unfortunately, has a mixture of the comic in it. And yet, notwithstanding its lighter touches, I question whether we shall be able to find a deeper tragedy among all the volumes of the churchyard. CHAPTER XVI. “Like a timeless birth, the womb of fate Bore a new death of unrecorded date, And doubtful name.”--MONTGOMERY. [Sidenote: THE ECONOMY OF ACCIDENT.]