I had reason to rejoice in the firmness of my gloomy thoughts, when, about ten o’clock on Thursday evening, Mr. Carlisle told us to prepare ourselves, for we had reason to expect the fatal event every moment.  To my thinking, she did not appear to be in that state of total exhaustion, which I supposed to precede death; but it is probable that death does not always take place by that gradual process I had pictured to myself; a sudden pang may accelerate his arrival.  She did not die on Thursday night.

Till now it does not appear that she had any serious thoughts of dying; but on Friday and Saturday, the two last days of her life, she occasionally spoke as if she expected it.  This was however only at intervals; the thought did not seem to dwell upon her mind.  Mr. Carlisle rejoiced in this.  He observed, and there is great force in the suggestion, that there is no more pitiable object, than a sick man, that knows he is dying.  The thought must be expected to destroy his courage, to co-operate with the disease, and to counteract every favourable effort of nature.

On these two days her faculties were in too decayed a state, to be able to follow any train of ideas with force or any accuracy of connection.  Her religion, as I have already shown, was not calculated to be the torment of a sick bed; and, in fact, during her whole illness, not one word of a religious cast fell from her lips.

She was affectionate and compliant to the last.  I observed on Friday and Saturday nights, that, whenever her attendants recommended to her to sleep, she discovered her willingness to yield, by breathing, perhaps for the space of a minute, in the manner of a person that sleeps, though the effort, from the state of her disorder, usually proved ineffectual.

She was not tormented by useless contradiction.  One night the servant, from an error in judgment, teazed her with idle expostulations, but she complained of it grievously, and it was corrected.  “Pray, pray, do not let her reason with me,” was her expression.  Death itself is scarcely so dreadful to the enfeebled frame, as the monotonous importunity of nurses ever-lastingly repeated.

Seeing that every hope was extinct, I was very desirous of obtaining from her any directions, that she might wish to have followed after her decease.  Accordingly, on Saturday morning, I talked to her for a good while of the two children.  In conformity to Mr. Carlisle’s maxim of not impressing the idea of death, I was obliged to manage my expressions.  I therefore affected to proceed wholly upon the ground of her having been very ill, and that it would be some time before she could expect to be well; wishing her to tell me any thing that she would choose to have done respecting the children, as they would now be principally under my care.  After having repeated this idea to her in a great variety of forms, she at length said, with a significant tone of voice, “I know what you are thinking of,” but added, that she had nothing to communicate to me upon the subject.