cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,--the
fate that many a martyr had had to face,--to be first strangled and
then burned. Death had not the terror for him that it has for most
young persons. He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes
wistfully, even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction
had come upon him as a temptation. But here was death in an unexpected
and appalling shape. He did not know before how much he cared to live.
All his old recollections came before him as it were in one long, vivid
flash. The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line, and
past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision. The
dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror. He
felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,--the
rush of air,--the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into
which he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures
which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat
themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures
passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if
simultaneous. The vision of the "inward eye" was so intensified in this
moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence.
Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description
means. The development of a photograph may not explain it, but it
illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections
of the drowning man's experience. The sensitive plate has taken one look
at a scene, and remembers it all,

Every little circumstance is there,--the hoof in air, the wing in
flight, the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks. All there, but
invisible; potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if not
existing at all. A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene comes
out in all its perfection of detail. In those supreme moments when death
stares a man suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods
the undeveloped pictures of vanished years, stored away in the memory,
the vast panorama of a lifetime, and in one swift instant the past comes
out as vividly as if it were again the present. So it was at this moment
with the sick man, as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die.
For he saw no hope of relief: the smoke was drifting in clouds into
the room; the flames were very near; if he was not r