I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. Johnson.

THE CRIME 1920.

On a bleak wet stormy afternoon at the outset of last year's Spring, I
was in a cottage, all alone, and knowing that I must be all alone till
evening. It was a remote cottage, in a remote county, and had been 'let
furnished' by its owner. My spirits are easily affected by weather, and
I hate solitude. And I dislike to be master of things that are not mine.
'Be careful not to break us,' say the glass and china. 'You'd better
not spill ink on me,' growls the carpet. 'None of your dog's-earing,
thumb-marking, back-breaking tricks here!' snarl the books.

The books in this cottage looked particularly disagreeable--horrid
little upstarts of this and that scarlet or cerulean 'series' of
'standard' authors. Having gloomily surveyed them, I turned my back on
them, and watched the rain streaming down the latticed window, whose
panes seemed likely to be shattered at any moment by the wind. I have
known men who constantly visit the Central Criminal Court, visit also
the scenes where famous crimes were committed, form their own theories
of those crimes, collect souvenirs of those crimes, and call themselves
Criminologists. As for me, my interest in crime is, alas, merely morbid.
I did not know, as those others would doubtless have known, that
the situation in which I found myself was precisely of the kind most
conducive to the darkest deeds. I did but bemoan it, and think of Lear
in the hovel on the heath. The wind howled in the chimney, and the rain
had begun to sputter right down it, so that the fire was beginning to
hiss in a very sinister manner. Suppose the fire went out! It looked as
if it meant to. I snatched the pair of bellows that hung beside it. I
plied them vigorously. 'Now mind!--not too vigorously. We aren't yours!'
they wheezed. I handled them more gently. But I did not release them
till they had secured me a steady blaze.

I sat down before that blaze. Despair had been warded off. Gloom,
however, remained; and gloom grew. I felt that I should prefer any one's
thoughts to mine. I rose, I returned to the books. A dozen or so of
those which were on the lowest of the three shelves were full-sized,
were octavo, looked as though they had been bought to be read. I would
exercise my undoubted right to read one of them. Which of them? I
gradually decided on a novel by a well-known writer whose works, though
I had several times had the honour of m