It was thus we talked while Matthew lay dying, for why should we not talk as we had lived?  We both laughed long and heartily over this story; perhaps it would have amused us less had Matthew not been dying; and then his kind old nurse brought in our lunch.  We had both excellent appetites, and were far from indifferent to the dainty little meal which was to be our last but one together.  I brought my table as close to Matthew’s pillow as was possible, and he stroked my hand with tenderness in which there was a touch of gratitude.

‘You are not frightened of the bacteria!’ he laughed sadly; and then he told me, with huge amusement, how a friend (and a true, dear friend for all that) had come to see him a day or two before, and had hung over the end of the bed to say farewell, daring to approach no nearer, mopping his fear-perspiring brows with a handkerchief soaked in ‘Eucalyptus’!

‘He had brought an anticipatory elegy too,’ said my friend, ’written against my burial.  I wish you’d read it for me,’ and he fidgeted for it in the nervous manner of the dying.  Finding it among his pillows, he handed it to me saying, ’You needn’t be frightened of it.  It is well dosed with Eucalyptus.’

We laughed even more over this poem than over our stories, and then we discussed the terms of three cremation societies to which, at the express request of my friend, I had written a day or two before.

Then having smoked a cigar and drunk a glass of port together (for the assured dying are allowed to ’live well’), Matthew grew sleepy, and, tucking him beneath the counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he was not to die that day.

Circumstances prevented my seeing him again for a week.  When I did so, entering the room poignantly redolent of the strange sweet odour of antiseptics, I saw that the great artist had been busy in my absence.  Indeed, his work was nearly at an end.  Yet to one unfamiliar with his methods there was still little to alarm in Matthew’s face.  In fact, with the exception of his brain, and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever.  And even to his brain had come a certain unnatural activity, a life as of the grave, a sort of vampire vitality, which would assuredly have deceived any who had not known him.  He still told his stories, laughed and talked with the same unconquerable humour, was in every way alert and practical, with this difference, that he had forgotten he was going to die, that the world in which he exercised his various faculties was another world to that in which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, smoked our last cigar together.  His talk was so convincingly rational, dealt with such unreal matters in so every-day a fashion, that you were ready to think that surely it was you and not he whose mind was wandering.