powerless by
his side; his head sank forward; it seemed as if horror and despair
had unstrung every nerve and sinew; he appeared to collapse and shrink
together as a plant might under the influence of a withering spell.

It has often been my fate, since then, to visit the chambers of death
and of suffering; I have witnessed fearful agonies of body and of
soul; the mysterious shudderings of the departing spirit, and the
heart-rending desolation of the survivors; the severing of the tenderest
ties, the piteous yearnings of unavailing love--of all these things
the sad duties of my profession have made me a witness. But, generally
speaking, I have observed in such scenes some thing to mitigate, if not
the sorrows, at least the terrors, of death; the dying man seldom
seems to feel the reality of his situation; a dull consciousness of
approaching dissolution, a dim anticipation of unconsciousness and
insensibility, are the feelings which most nearly border upon an
appreciation of his state; the film of death seems to have overspread
the mind's eye, objects lose their distinctness, and float cloudily
before it, and the apathy and apparent indifference with which men
recognise the sure advances of immediate death, rob that awful hour
of much of its terrors, and the death-bed of its otherwise inevitable
agonies.

This is a merciful dispensation; but the rule has its exceptions--its
terrible exceptions. When a man is brought in an instant, by some sudden
accident, to the very verge of the fathomless pit of death, with all
his recollections awake, and his perceptions keenly and vividly alive,
without previous illness to subdue the tone of the mind as to dull its
apprehensions--then, and then only, the death-bed is truly terrible.

Oh, what a contrast did O'Connor afford as he lay in all the abject
helplessness of undisguised terror upon his death-bed, to the proud
composure with which he had taken the field that morning. I had always
before thought of death as of a quiet sleep stealing gradually upon
exhausted nature, made welcome by suffering, or, at least, softened by
resignation; I had never before stood by the side of one upon whom the
hand of death had been thus suddenly laid; I had never seen the tyrant
arrayed in his terror till then. Never before or since have I seen
horror so intensely depicted. It seemed actually as if O'Connor's mind
had been unsettled by the shock; the few words he uttered were marked
with all the i