The next to go was Mr. Garrow.  His death was a very sudden and unexpected one.  He was a robust and apparently perfectly healthy man.  I was absent from home when he died.  I had gone with a Cornishman, a Mr. Trewhella, who was desirous of visiting Mr. Sloane’s copper mine, in the neighbourhood of Volterra, of which I have before spoken.  We had accomplished our visit, and were returning over the Apennine about six o’clock in the morning in a little bagherino, as the country cart-gigs are called, when we were hailed by a man in a similar carriage meeting us, whom I recognised as the foreman of a carpenter we employed.  He had been sent to find me, and bring me home with all speed, in consequence of the sudden illness of Mr. Garrow.  As far as I could learn from him there was little probability of finding my father-in-law alive.  I made the best of my way to Florence.  But he had been dead several hours when I arrived.  He had waked with a paralytic attack on him, which deprived him of the power of moving on the left side, and drawing his face awry, made speech almost impossible to him.  He assured his servant—­who was almost immediately with him—­speaking with much difficulty, that it was nothing of any importance, and that he should soon get over it.  But these were the last words he ever spoke, and in two or three hours afterwards he breathed his last.

Then in a few years more the crescendo wave of trouble took my mother from me at the age of eighty-three.  For the last two or three years she had entirely lost her memory, and for the last few months the use of her mental faculties.  And she did not suffer much.  The last words she uttered were “Poor Cecilia!”—­her mind reverting in her latest moments to the child whose loss had been the most recent.  She had for years entertained a great horror and dread of the possibility of being buried alive, in consequence of the very short time allowed by the law for a body to remain unburied after death; and she had exacted from me a promise that I would in any case cause a vein to be opened in her arm after death.  In her case there could be no possible room for the shadow of doubt as to the certainty of death; but I was bound by my promise, and found some difficulty in the performance of it.  The medical man in attendance, declaring the absolute absurdity of any doubt on the subject, refused to perform an operation which, he said, was wholly uncalled for, and argued that my promise could only be understood to apply to a case of possible doubt.  I had none; but was none the less determined to be faithful to my promise.  But it was not till I declared that I would myself sever a vein, in however butcher-like a manner, that I induced him to accompany me to the death-chamber and perform under my eyes the necessary operation.

My mother, the inseparable companion of so many wanderings in so many lands, the indefatigable labourer of so many years, found her rest near to the two who had gone from my house before, in the beautiful little cemetery on which the Apennine looks down.