Whether Calvin died of old age, or was carried off by one of the diseases incident to youth, it is impossible to say; for his departure was as quiet as his advent was mysterious.  I only know that he appeared to us in this world in his perfect stature and beauty, and that after a time, like Lohengrin, he withdrew.  In his illness there was nothing more to be regretted than in all his blameless life.  I suppose there never was an illness that had more of dignity, and sweetness and resignation in it.  It came on gradually, in a kind of listlessness and want of appetite.  An alarming symptom was his preference for the warmth of a furnace-register to the lively sparkle of the open woodfire.  Whatever pain he suffered, he bore it in silence, and seemed only anxious not to obtrude his malady.  We tempted him with the delicacies of the season, but it soon became impossible for him to eat, and for two weeks he ate or drank scarcely anything.  Sometimes he made an effort to take something, but it was evident that he made the effort to please us.  The neighbors—­and I am convinced that the advice of neighbors is never good for anything—­suggested catnip.  He would n’t even smell it.  We had the attendance of an amateur practitioner of medicine, whose real office was the cure of souls, but nothing touched his case.  He took what was offered, but it was with the air of one to whom the time for pellets was passed.  He sat or lay day after day almost motionless, never once making a display of those vulgar convulsions or contortions of pain which are so disagreeable to society.  His favorite place was on the brightest spot of a Smyrna rug by the conservatory, where the sunlight fell and he could hear the fountain play.  If we went to him and exhibited our interest in his condition, he always purred in recognition of our sympathy.  And when I spoke his name, he looked up with an expression that said, “I understand it, old fellow, but it’s no use.”  He was to all who came to visit him a model of calmness and patience in affliction.

I was absent from home at the last, but heard by daily postal-card of his failing condition; and never again saw him alive.  One sunny morning, he rose from his rug, went into the conservatory (he was very thin then), walked around it deliberately, looking at all the plants he knew, and then went to the bay-window in the dining-room, and stood a long time looking out upon the little field, now brown and sere, and toward the garden, where perhaps the happiest hours of his life had been spent.  It was a last look.  He turned and walked away, laid himself down upon the bright spot in the rug, and quietly died.