I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and, feeling now rather less torpid, got up and walked on towards Langham Place.  I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts about death.  Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end of Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab, and went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder.  It struck me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death on the morrow had led to my death that day.

But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and the next.  I knew more and more certainly that I should die under the operation; at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself.  The doctors were coming at eleven, and I did not get up.  It seemed scarce worth while to trouble about washing and dressing, and though I read my newspapers and the letters that came by the first post, I did not find them very interesting.  There was a friendly note from Addison, my old school-friend, calling my attention to two discrepancies and a printer’s error in my new book, with one from Langridge venting some vexation over Minton.  The rest were business communications.  I breakfasted in bed.  The glow of pain at my side seemed more massive.  I knew it was pain, and yet, if you can understand, I did not find it very painful.  I had been awake and hot and thirsty in the night, but in the morning bed felt comfortable.  In the night-time I had lain thinking of things that were past; in the morning I dozed over the question of immortality.  Haddon came, punctual to the minute, with a neat black bag; and Mowbray soon followed.  Their arrival stirred me up a little.  I began to take a more personal interest in the proceedings.  Haddon moved the little octagonal table close to the bedside, and, with his broad back to me, began taking things out of his bag.  I heard the light click of steel upon steel.  My imagination, I found, was not altogether stagnant.  “Will you hurt me much?” I said in an off-hand tone.

“Not a bit,” Haddon answered over his shoulder.  “We shall chloroform you.  Your heart’s as sound as a bell.”  And as he spoke, I had a whiff of the pungent sweetness of the anaesthetic.

They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and, almost before I realised what was happening, the chloroform was being administered.  It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating sensation at first.  I knew I should die—­that this was the end of consciousness for me.  And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared for death:  I had a vague sense of a duty overlooked—­I knew not what.  What was it I had not done?  I could think of nothing more to do, nothing desirable left in life; and yet I had the strangest disinclination to death.  And the physical sensation was painfully oppressive.  Of course the doctors did not know they were going to kill me.  Possibly I struggled.  Then I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous silence, and an impenetrable blackness came upon me.