osely inserted, or
premeditated treachery on La Cibot's part. He would prevent this.
Trognon should dictate a holograph will which should be signed and
deposited in a sealed envelope in a drawer. Then Schmucke, hidden in one
of the cabinets in his alcove, should see La Cibot search for the will,
find it, open the envelope, read it through, and seal it again. Next
morning, at nine o'clock, he would cancel the will and make a new one in
the presence of two notaries, everything in due form and order. La Cibot
had treated him as a madman and a visionary; he saw what this meant--he
saw the Presidente's hate and greed, her revenge in La Cibot's behavior.
In the sleepless hours and lonely days of the last two months, the poor
man had sifted the events of his past life.

It has been the wont of sculptors, ancient and modern, to set a tutelary
genius with a lighted torch upon either side of a tomb. Those torches
that light up the paths of death throw light for dying eyes upon the
spectacle of a life's mistakes and sins; the carved stone figures
express great ideas, they are symbols of a fact in human experience. The
agony of death has its own wisdom. Not seldom a simple girl, scarcely
more than a child, will grow wise with the experience of a hundred
years, will gain prophetic vision, judge her family, and see clearly
through all pretences, at the near approach of Death. Herein lies
Death's poetry. But, strange and worthy of remark it is, there are two
manners of death.

The poetry of prophecy, the gift of seeing clearly into the future or
the past, only belongs to those whose bodies are stricken, to those
who die by the destruction of the organs of physical life. Consumptive
patients, for instance, or those who die of gangrene like Louis XIV.,
of fever like Pons, of a stomach complaint like Mme. de Mortsauf, or
of wounds received in the full tide of life like soldiers on the
battlefield--all these may possess this supreme lucidity to the full;
their deaths fill us with surprise and wonder. But many, on the other
hand, die of _intelligential_ diseases, as they may be called; of
maladies seated in the brain or in that nervous system which acts as a
kind of purveyor of thought fuel--and these die wholly, body and spirit
are darkened together. The former are spirits deserted by the body,
realizing for us our ideas of the spirits of Scripture; the latter are
bodies untenanted by a spirit.

Too late the virgin nature, the epicure-