The evidence given in the concluding portion of the investigation was necessarily less sensational.  There were no more witnesses to bring the scent of blood over the coroner’s table; those who had yet to be heard were merely relatives and friends of the deceased, who spoke of him as he had been in life.  His parents were dead, perhaps happily for them; his relatives had seen little of him, and had scarce heard as much about him as the outside world.  No man is a prophet in his own country, and, even if he migrates, it is advisable for him to leave his family at home.  His friends were a motley crew; friends of the same friend are not necessarily friends of one another.  But their diversity only made the congruity of the tale they had to tell more striking.  It was the tale of a man who had never made an enemy even by benefiting him, nor lost a friend even by refusing his favours; the tale of a man whose heart overflowed with peace and goodwill to all men all the year round; of a man to whom Christmas came not once, but three hundred and sixty-five times a year; it was the tale of a brilliant intellect, who gave up to mankind what was meant for himself, and worked as a labourer in the vineyard of humanity, never crying that the grapes were sour; of a man uniformly cheerful and of good courage, living in that forgetfulness of self which is the truest antidote to despair.  And yet there was not quite wanting the note of pain to jar the harmony and make it human.  Richard Elton, his chum from boyhood, and vicar of Somerton, in Midlandshire, handed to the coroner a letter received from the deceased about ten days before his death, containing some passages which the coroner read aloud:—­“Do you know anything of Schopenhauer?  I mean anything beyond the current misconceptions?  I have been making his acquaintance lately.  He is an agreeable rattle of a pessimist; his essay on ‘The Misery of Mankind’ is quite lively reading.  At first his assimilation of Christianity and Pessimism (it occurs in his essay on ‘Suicide’) dazzled me as an audacious paradox.  But there is truth in it.  Verily the whole creation groaneth and travaileth, and man is a degraded monster, and sin is over all.  Ah, my friend, I have shed many of my illusions since I came to this seething hive of misery and wrongdoing.  What shall one man’s life—­a million men’s lives—­avail against the corruption, the vulgarity, and the squalor of civilisation?  Sometimes I feel like a farthing rushlight in the Hall of Eblis.  Selfishness is so long and life so short.  And the worst of it is that everybody is so beastly contented.  The poor no more desire comfort than the rich culture.  The woman, to whom a penny school fee for her child represents an appreciable slice of her income, is satisfied that the rich we shall always have with us.