About this time, indeed, persons in the play of Mary Lee were dying Hamletwise. One after another, swiftly, bodies were being trundled off the stage.

Aunt Jael's leadership of the Seven Old Maids of Tawborough was maintained in death. It was edifying to note that just as sixty years ago they had briskly emulated her Conversion, now with equal alacrity they followed her to her Home above.

Within three months Miss Glory Clinker departed. One February morning she went away; wide-eyed, stuttering, triumphant. I heard her last words. "The night is far spent, the day is at hand—er-er-er." Her eyes lit up; a beatific happiness brightened the kind foolish old face. "Er-er-er—." She was stammering before the Throne.

Of the Seven, Salvation alone survived for long: till her one hundred and fourth year, a few years only before the time at which I write, almost into the new century that is at hand. Her last words were incoherent. I could not catch them, though I tried to.

Pentecost Dodderidge outlived his most famous convert by seven months only. He was in his one hundredth year. A stroke of paralysis came suddenly, followed by a restless ten days, in which he suffered intense pain and displayed eternal patience, and which he filled with edifying epigrams and godly saws and instances, all reverently collected by the faithful ones around his bed and embodied in his Choice Sayings. (The volume is before me as I write.) As the last saved soul to whom he had stood Baptist, and as the grand-niece and grandchild of "those two eminent bright jewels in our Saviour's crown," I was specially in request at the old man's bedside. His last words, spoken clearly and solemnly, with all the actor-like sincerity of his greatest days, were these, each utterance coming a clear moment or two after the other:

"Peace within and rest."

"I have peace with God."

"The Peace of God which passeth all understanding—"

This, his last utterance, was given at about a quarter past eight. Some forty minutes later he passed away: voyaging peacefully to Heaven.

Of another death I knew only by hearsay. It was a Bonapartist intriguer who, just before the dynasty's disaster, had ratted to the Republicans, and in the struggle with the Red Commune of Paris became a spy for the Versaillais. I first saw the name and the bare fact in the French newspapers, but a fuller story reached me in another way. Of the Grand Rouquette, Red gaolers, a cage. A name on a list. One word at the foot: Condemned. A yard, a high wall covered with vines and creepers. A May morning, six priests who died like heroes, filthy insults, levelled rifles. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Fire! an explosion. A curled-up corpse upon the ground.

His former employer lived a few years longer, keeping Death at bay by sheer fussiness. Her last gesture, Gabrielle wrote me, was a deprecatory shrug of the shoulder; her last (recorded) utterance "Enfin—"

In another, an uglier death than any, the human creature gave way to the passion of extreme sickening fear, to fawning appeals for God's mercy, to every last licence—except the use of the first person singular. I stood outside; Aunt Martha would not let me enter the room for very shame, though I peeped in once and saw the pale face livid with fear, streaming with sweat, contorted with agony of body and soul.

"Forgive, Lord, forgive!" he was whining, "all has been done for Thy sake. One sees one's filthy sinfulness, one sees the error of one's ways—"

Not in such cowardly supplication, but in arrogant prayer, prayer as to an equal, prayer to his young friend God, died a braver, wickeder old man. They found him kneeling against his bed: heart-failure, said the doctor. His face was insolent, beautiful, serene. His soul had strolled disdainfully into Heaven, as a gentleman's should. Among his papers were found two worn photographs; one of my mother, the only one she had ever had taken, showing her in all the innocent beauty of her maidenhood, the other of myself, taken in France, which, against my will Grandmother had managed to convey to him. On the back of each of them was written, in his hand-writing:—"I have kissed this picture to shreds. They do not know. God knows."

For me, those are his Last Words.