from now nobody will know that the place where I lie does n’t hold as stout and straight a man as the best of ’em that stretch out as if they were proud of the room they take.  You may get me well, if you can, Sir, if you think it worth while to try; but I tell you there has been no time for this many a year when the smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me than all the flowers that grow out of it.  There’s no anodyne like your good clean gravel, Sir.  But if you can keep me about awhile, and it amuses you to try, you may show your skill upon me, if you like.  There is a pleasure or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night is not far off, at best.—­I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me, and come, if you like, in the morning.

Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment.  The beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often do, with a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes.  The drapery fluttered on the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the window;—­a crack of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind stirred the hanging folds.  In my excited state, I seemed to see something ominous in that arm pointing to the heavens.  I thought of the figures in the Dance of Death at Basle, and that other on the panels of the covered Bridge at Lucerne, and it seemed to me that the grim mask who mingles with every crowd and glides over every threshold was pointing the sick man to his far home, and would soon stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag him on the unmeasured journey towards it.

The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first entered the chamber.  The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only these two objects.  They were enough.  The house was deadly still, and the night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as from a field of ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking corridor.  As I turned into the common passage, a white figure, holding a lamp, stood full before me.  I thought at first it was one of those images made to stand in niches and hold a light in their hands.  But the illusion was momentary, and my eyes speedily recovered from the shock of the bright flame and snowy drapery to see that the figure was a breathing one.  It was Iris, in one of her statue-trances.  She had come down, whether sleeping or waking, I knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her she was wanted,—­or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our movements,—­or, it may be, having learned from the servant that there was trouble which might ask for a woman’s hand.  I sometimes think women have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom they cannot see or hear, are in suffering.  How surely we find them at the bedside of the dying!  How strongly does Nature plead for them, that we should draw our first breath in their arms, as we sigh away our last upon their faithful breasts!