’Don’t you be annoying yourself, governor; I’m all right—­quite right; and as for you, why, you’ll be up and about yourself in another month or so.’

’I shall never be off this bed, my boy, till I’m carried into my coffin, on those chairs there.  But I’m not thinking of myself, Louis, but you; think what you may have before you if you can’t avoid that accursed bottle.’

’I’m all right, governor; right as a trivet.  It’s very little I take, except at an odd time or two.’

‘Oh, Louis!  Louis!’

’Come, father, cheer up; this sort of thing isn’t the thing for you at all.  I wonder where mother is:  she ought to be here with the broth; just let me go, and I’ll see for her.’

The father understood it all.  He saw that it was now much beyond his faded powers to touch the heart or conscience of such a youth as his son had become.  What now could he do for his boy except die?  What else, what other benefit, did his son require of him but to die; to die so that his means of dissipation might be unbounded?  He let go the unresisting hand which he held, and, as the young man crept out of the room, he turned his face to the wall.  He turned his face to the wall, and held bitter commune with his own heart.  To what had he brought himself?  To what had he brought his son?  Oh, how happy would it have been for him could he have remained all his days a working stone-mason in Barchester!  How happy could he have died as such, years ago!  Such tears as those which wet the pillow are the bitterest which human eyes can shed.

But while they were dropping, the memoir of his life was in quick course of preparation.  It was, indeed, nearly completed, with considerable detail.  He had lingered on four days longer than might have been expected, and the author had thus had more than usual time for the work.  In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.  When it chances that the dead hero is one who is taken in his prime of life, of whose departure from among us the most far-seeing, biographical scribe can have no prophetic inkling, this must be difficult.  Of great men, full of years, who are ripe of the sickle, who in the course of Nature must soon fall, it is of course comparatively easy for an active compiler to have his complete memoir ready in his desk.  But in order that the idea of omnipresent and omniscient information may be kept up, the young must be chronicled as quickly as the old.  In some cases this task must, one would say, be difficult.  Nevertheless it is done.