“This is a peculiar kind of disease.  It does not invite you to read; it does not invite you to be read to; it does not invite you to talk, nor to enjoy any of the usual sick-room methods of treatment.  What kind of a disease is that?  Some kinds of sicknesses have pleasant features about them.  You can read and smoke and have only to lie still.”

And a little later he added: 

“It is singular, very singular, the laws of mentality—­vacuity.  I put out my hand to reach a book or newspaper which I have been reading most glibly, and it isn’t there, not a suggestion of it.”

He coughed violently, and afterward commented: 

“If one gets to meddling with a cough it very soon gets the upper hand and is meddling with you.  That is my opinion—­of seventy-four years’ growth.”

The news of his condition, everywhere published, brought great heaps of letters, but he could not see them.  A few messages were reported to him.  At intervals he read a little.  Suetonius and Carlyle lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up as the spirit moved him and read a paragraph or a page.  Sometimes, when I saw him thus-the high color still in his face, and the clear light in his eyes—­I said:  “It is not reality.  He is not going to die.”  On Tuesday, the 19th, he asked me to tell Clara to come and sing to him.  It was a heavy requirement, but she somehow found strength to sing some of the Scotch airs which he loved, and he seemed soothed and comforted.  When she came away he bade her good-by, saying that he might not see her again.

But he lingered through the next day and the next.  His mind was wandering a little on Wednesday, and his speech became less and less articulate; but there were intervals when he was quite clear, quite vigorous, and he apparently suffered little.  We did not know it, then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth-year, so long anticipated by him, appeared that night in the sky.—­[The perihelion of Halley’s Comet for 1835 was November 16th; for 1910 it was April 20th.]

On Thursday morning, the 21st, his mind was generally clear, and it was said by the nurses that he read a little from one of the volumes on his bed, from the Suetonius, or from one of the volumes of Carlyle.  Early in the forenoon he sent word by Clara that he wished to see me, and when I came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to “throw away,” as he briefly expressed it, for he had not many words left now.  I assured him that I would take care of them, and he pressed my hand.  It was his last word to me.

Once or twice that morning he tried to write some request which he could not put into intelligible words.

And once he spoke to Gabrilowitsch, who, he said, could understand him better than the others.  Most of the time he dozed.

Somewhat after midday, when Clara was by him, he roused up and took her hand, and seemed to speak with less effort.