painfully conscious of overwork and brain-fag.  He told his friend Castelli that he was tormented by sleeplessness, but still more by certain ideas which assailed him at night, and which he could not get rid of.  He got up and walked about the room, but all was useless; “I am no longer master of my head.”  When Parliament was open, he never missed a sitting, and he left nothing to subordinates in the several departments in his charge.  While his mental processes remained clear and orderly, the brain, when not governed by the will, did its tasks as a tired slave does them; thus he was surrounded by a mass of confused papers and documents, amongst which he sometimes had to seek for days for the one required at the moment.

In the last half of May he was noticed to be unwontedly irritable and impatient of contradiction.  The debates bored him; on the last day that he sat in his accustomed place, he said that, when Italy was made, he would bring in a Bill to abolish all the chairs of rhetoric.  That evening he was taken ill with fever; his own physician was absent, and he dictated a treatment to the doctor who was called in, which he thought would make his illness a short one.  He was bled five times in four days.  On the fourth day he summoned a cabinet council to his bedside; the ministers, sharing his own opinion that he was better, allowed it to be prolonged for several hours.  When they went out, an old friend came in and read death in his face.  Other doctors were consulted, and the treatment was changed.  It was too late.  From the first the chance of recovery was small, owing to the mental tension at which Cavour had lived for months; whatever chance there was had been thrown away.  He knew people when he first saw them, but then fell back into lethargy or delirium.  Suddenly he said:  “The king must be told.”

When the case became evidently desperate, the family sent for a monk, named Fra Giacomo, who had promised Cavour during the cholera epidemic of 1854 that the refusal of the sacraments to Santa Rosa should not be repeated in his own extremity.  An excited crowd gathered round the palace.  One workman said:  “If the priests refuse, a word and we will finish them all.”  But Fra Giacomo kept his promise.  “I know the Count,” he said (for many years he had dispensed his private charities); “a clasp of the hand will be sufficient.”  On the evening of the same day, June 5, the king ascended the secret staircase leading to Cavour’s bedroom, which had been so often mounted before dawn by too compromising visitors.  Cavour exclaimed on seeing him:  “O Maesta!” but the recognition seemed not to last.  “These Neapolitans, they must be cleansed,” he said, interrupting the sovereign’s kind commonplaces of a hope that was not.  Then he ordered that his secretary, Artom, should be ready to transact business with him at five next morning; “there was no time to lose.”  Cavour’s biographers have repeated statements as to precepts and injunctions