Dear Herbert,—­Four nights ago I dreamed a strange dream.  I was in a big, well-furnished, airy room, with people moving about in it; I knew none of them, but we were on friendly terms, and talked and laughed together.  Quite suddenly I was struck somewhere in the chest by some rough, large missile, fired, I thought, from a gun, though I heard no explosion; it pierced my ribs, and buried itself, I felt, in some vital part.  I stumbled to a couch and fell upon it; some one came to raise me, and I was aware that other persons ran hither and thither seeking, I thought, for medical aid and remedies.  I knew within myself that my last hour had come; I was not in pain, but life and strength ebbed from me by swift degrees.  I felt an intolerable sense of indignity in my helplessness, and an intense desire to be left alone that I might die in peace; death came fast upon me with clouded brain and fluttering breath. . . .

SIBTHORPE vicarage, Wells,
Jan. 7, 1905.

Dear Nellie,—­I have just opened your letter, and you will know how my whole heart goes out to you.  I cannot understand it, I cannot realise it; and I would give anything to be able to say a word that should bring you any comfort or help.  God keep and sustain you, as I know He can sustain in these dark hours.  I cannot write more to-day; but I send you the letter that I was writing, when your own letter came.  It helps me even now to think that my dear Herbert told me himself—­for that, I see, was the purpose of my dim dream—­ what was befalling him.  And I am as sure as I can be of anything that he is with us, with you, still.  Dear friend, if I could only be with you now; but you will know that my thoughts and prayers are with you every moment.—­Ever your affectionate,

T. B.

[I add an extract from my Diary.—­T.  B.]

Diary, Jan. 15.—­A week ago, while I was writing the above unfinished lines, I received a letter to say that my friend Herbert was dead—­he to whom these letters have been written.  It seems that he had been getting, to all appearances, better; that he had had no renewed threatenings of the complaint that had made him an exile.  But, rising from his chair in the course of the evening, he had cried out faintly; put his hand to his breast; fallen back in his chair unconscious, and, in a few minutes, had ceased to breathe.  They say it was a sudden heart-failure.

It is as though we had been watching by a burrow with all precaution that some little hunted creature should not escape, and that, while we watched and devised, it had slipped off by some other outlet the very existence of which we had not suspected.

Of course, as far as he himself is concerned, such a death is simply a piece of good fortune.  If I could know that such would be the manner of my own death, a real weight would be lifted from my mind.  To die quickly and suddenly, in all the activity of life, in comparative tranquillity, with none of the hideous apparatus of the sick-room about one, with no dreary waiting for death, that is a great joy.  But for his wife and his poor girls!  To have had no last word, no conscious look from one whose delicate consideration for others was so marked a part of his nature, this is a terrible and stupefying misery.