D SHIEL,--I have just been lying thinking of you, and wishing
that you were here to give one a last squeeze of the hand before
I--"_go_": for, by all appearance, "going" I am. Four days ago, I began
to feel a soreness in the throat, and passing by old Johnson's surgery
at Selbridge, went in and asked him to have a look at me. He muttered
something about membranous laryngitis which made me smile, but by the
time I reached home I was hoarse, and not smiling: before night I had
dyspnoca and laryngeal stridor. I at once telegraphed to London for
Morgan, and, between him and Johnson, they have been opening my trachea,
and burning my inside with chromic acid and the galvanic cautery. The
difficulty as to breathing has subsided, and it is wonderful how little
I suffer: but I am much too old a hand not to know what's what: the
bronchi are involved--_too far_ involved--and as a matter of absolute
fact, there isn't any hope. Morgan is still, I believe, fondly dwelling
upon the possibility of adding me to his successful-tracheotomy
statistics, but prognosis was always my strong point, and I say No. The
very small consolation of my death will be the beating of a specialist
in his own line. So we shall see.

'I have been arranging some of my affairs this morning, and remembered
these notebooks. I intended letting you have them months ago, but my
habit of putting things off, and the fact that the lady was alive from
whom I took down the words, prevented me. Now she is dead, and as a
literary man, and a student of life, you should be interested, if you
can manage to read them. You may even find them valuable.

'I am under a little morphia at present, propped up in a nice little
state of languor, and as I am able to write without much effort, I will
tell you in the old Pitman's something about her. Her name was Miss Mary
Wilson; she was about thirty when I met her, forty-five when she died,
and I knew her intimately all those fifteen years. Do you know anything
about the philosophy of the hypnotic trance? Well, that was the relation
between us--hypnotist and subject. She had been under another man before
my time, but no one was ever so successful with her as I. She suffered
from _tic douloureux_ of the fifth nerve. She had had most of her teeth
drawn before I saw her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out the
nerve on the left side by the external scission. But it made no
difference: all the clocks in hell tick-tacked in that poor