irm to the
last; but they say he grew less talkative towards the end, and would
listen to other people by the hour in an amused and sympathetic silence.
Only, when he did speak, it was more to the point and more charged with
old experience. He drank a bottle of wine gladly; above all, at sunset
on the hill-top or quite late at night under the stars in the arbour. The
sight of something attractive and unatttainable seasoned his enjoyment,
he would say; and he professed he had lived long enough to admire a
candle all the more when he could compare it with a planet.

One night, in his seventy-second year, he awoke in bed in such uneasiness
of body and mind that he arose and dressed himself and went out to
meditate in the arbour. It was pitch dark, without a star; the river was
swollen, and the wet woods and meadows loaded the air with perfume. It
had thundered during the day, and it promised more thunder for the
morrow. A murky, stifling night for a man of seventy-two! Whether it
was the weather or the wakefulness, or some little touch of fever in his
old limbs, Will's mind was besieged by tumultuous and crying memories.
His boyhood, the night with the fat young man, the death of his adopted
parents, the summer days with Marjory, and many of those small
circumstances, which seem nothing to another, and are yet the very gist
of a man's own life to himself--things seen, words heard, looks
misconstrued--arose from their forgotten corners and usurped his
attention. The dead themselves were with him, not merely taking part in
this thin show of memory that defiled before his brain, but revisiting
his bodily senses as they do in profound and vivid dreams. The fat young
man leaned his elbows on the table opposite; Marjory came and went with
an apronful of flowers between the garden and the arbour; he could hear
the old parson knocking out his pipe or blowing his resonant nose. The
tide of his consciousness ebbed and flowed: he was sometimes half-asleep
and drowned in his recollections of the past; and sometimes he was broad
awake, wondering at himself. But about the middle of the night he was
startled by the voice of the dead miller calling to him out of the house
as he used to do on the arrival of custom. The hallucination was so
perfect that Will sprang from his seat and stood listening for the
summons to be repeated; and as he listened he became conscious of another
noise besides the brawling of the river and the ring