I was going into the dark and I was not afraid—­with ostentation.  I still regard that, though now with scarcely so much gravity as heretofore, as a very magnificent period in my life.  For nearly four months I was dying with immense dignity.  Plutarch might have recorded it.  I wrote—­in touchingly unsteady pencil—­to all my intimate friends, and indeed to many other people.  I saw the littleness of hate and ambition.  I forgave my enemies, and they were subdued and owned to it.  How they must regret these admissions!  I made many memorable remarks.  This lasted, I say, nearly four months.

The medical profession, which had pronounced my death sentence, reiterated it steadily—­has, indeed, done so now this ten years.  Towards the end of those four months, however, dying lost its freshness for me.  I began to detect a certain habitual quality in my service.  I had exhausted all my memorable remarks upon the subject, and the strain began to tell upon all of us.

One day in the spring-time I crawled out alone, carefully wrapped, and with a stick, to look once more—­perhaps for the last time—­on sky and earth, and the first scattered skirmishers of the coming army of flowers.  It was a day of soft wind, when the shadows of the clouds go sweeping over the hills.  Quite casually I happened upon a girl clambering over a hedge, and her dress had caught in a bramble, and the chat was quite impromptu and most idyllic.  I remember she had three or four wood anemones in her hand—­“wind stars” she called them, and I thought it a pretty name.  And we talked of this and that, with a light in our eyes, as young folks will.

I quite forgot I was a Doomed Man.  I surprised myself walking home with a confident stride that jarred with the sudden recollection of my funereal circumstances.  For a moment I tried in vain to think what it was had slipped my memory.  Then it came, colourless and remote.  “Oh!  Death....  He’s a Bore,” I said; “I’ve done with him,” and laughed to think of having done with him.

“And why not so?” said I.

THE END

This book appeared some years ago at another price and in another form.  The Publisher believes that its present guise will bring it within the reach of all and sundry, who, while delighting in the marriage of wit with wisdom, cannot complete the trilogy with the third desideratum of wealth.

PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, EDINBURGH

[Illustration:  Front Book Cover]

CERTAIN
PERSONAL
MATTERS

By

H.G.  WELLS
Author of the “Time Machine"

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE

Price One Shilling Also issued in Cloth, price 2s.

[Illustration:  Back Book Cover]

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