d have amused us less had Matthew not been dying; and
then his kind old nurse brought in our lunch. We had both excellent
appetites, and were far from indifferent to the dainty little meal which
was to be our last but one together. I brought my table as close to
Matthew's pillow as was possible, and he stroked my hand with tenderness
in which there was a touch of gratitude.

'You are not frightened of the bacteria!' he laughed sadly; and then he
told me, with huge amusement, how a friend (and a true, dear friend for
all that) had come to see him a day or two before, and had hung over the
end of the bed to say farewell, daring to approach no nearer, mopping
his fear-perspiring brows with a handkerchief soaked in 'Eucalyptus'!

'He had brought an anticipatory elegy too,' said my friend, 'written
against my burial. I wish you'd read it for me,' and he fidgeted for it
in the nervous manner of the dying. Finding it among his pillows, he
handed it to me saying, 'You needn't be frightened of it. It is well
dosed with Eucalyptus.'

We laughed even more over this poem than over our stories, and then we
discussed the terms of three cremation societies to which, at the
express request of my friend, I had written a day or two before.

Then having smoked a cigar and drunk a glass of port together (for the
assured dying are allowed to 'live well'), Matthew grew sleepy, and,
tucking him beneath the counterpane, I left him, for, after all, he was
not to die that day.

Circumstances prevented my seeing him again for a week. When I did so,
entering the room poignantly redolent of the strange sweet odour of
antiseptics, I saw that the great artist had been busy in my absence.
Indeed, his work was nearly at an end. Yet to one unfamiliar with his
methods there was still little to alarm in Matthew's face. In fact, with
the exception of his brain, and his ice-cold feet, he was alive as ever.
And even to his brain had come a certain unnatural activity, a life as
of the grave, a sort of vampire vitality, which would assuredly have
deceived any who had not known him. He still told his stories, laughed
and talked with the same unconquerable humour, was in every way alert
and practical, with this difference, that he had forgotten he was going
to die, that the world in which he exercised his various faculties was
another world to that in which, in spite of his delirium, we ate our
last boiled fowl, drank our last wine, smoked our last cigar tog