art. "It makes me sick and
trembling--with fear and horror--I can't bear it. It's comin' now.
Ah! Ah! Ah!"

I remember feeling inexpressibly shocked and horrified. I was not
used to such scenes. The room seemed to swim; I could hardly stand
or see. To settle myself, I spoke to the woman about wines and
medicines; but I seemed to hear my own voice hollow and from a
distance, and started at the sound of it.

But Arthur knelt simply down by the bedside and said, "I think it
will make it easier if you can only fix your thoughts on one thing. I
know the effort is hard; but think that there's a loving hand waiting
to take yours; there's One that loves you, better than you have
ever loved anyone yourself, waiting the other side of the darkness.
Oh, only think of that, and it will not be hard! Dear friend," he
said--"for I may call you that--we have all of us the same passage
before us, but we have all the same hope: and He hears the words you
speak to Him. He has been here, He is here now, to listen to your
very thoughts. He has seen your trouble, and wished He could help
you--why He can not I am not able to tell you; but it will all be
well.

"Let me say one prayer with you." And he began in his low quiet
voice. The woman knelt down beside him, shaken with sobbing. Till, at
the words "Suffer us not, for any pains of death, to fall from thee,"
poor George put out his old withered hand and took Arthur's, and
smiled through his pain--"the first time he ever smiled since his
illness began," his wife told us after his death, "and he smiled
many times after that."

He did not speak to us again; the effort had been too great. The
woman accompanied us down-stairs, showing, in her troubled officious
hurry to anticipate Arthur's wishes, and the way in which she hung
about the gate as we rode out, what it had been to her.

We rode home almost in silence. Arthur, as we got near to the lodge,
turned to me, and said, half apologetically, "We must speak to simple
people in the language that they can understand. Fortunately, there
is one language we can all understand."

CHAPTER IX

It was a hot summer, and Arthur a little overtasked his strength.
London, and a London season, is far more tiring than far greater
physical exertions in pure air and with rational hours. He complained
of feeling liable to faintness after standing about in hot rooms. It
did not cause him, however, any serious alarm, till one evening he
fainted a