t out into the dark chill shadow, and amidst the bloodless
forms of the dumb brute nature, ranged in grisly vista beyond the
death-room of man. And when the last infant shape had vanished, and the
door closed with a jarring click, my sight wandered loiteringly around
the chamber before I could bring myself to fix it on the broken form,
beside which I now stood in all that glorious vigour of frame which had
fostered the pride of my mind. In the moment consumed by my mournful
survey, the whole aspect of the place impressed itself ineffaceably
on lifelong remembrance. Through the high, deepsunken casement, across
which the thin, faded curtain was but half drawn, the moonlight rushed,
and then settled on the floor in one shroud of white glimmer, lost under
the gloom of the death-bed. The roof was low, and seemed lower still
by heavy intersecting beams, which I might have touched with my lifted
hand. And the tall guttering candle by the bedside, and the flicker from
the fire struggling out through the fuel but newly heaped on it, threw
their reflection on the ceiling just over my head in a reek of quivering
blackness, like an angry cloud.

Suddenly I felt my arm grasped; with his left hand (the right side was
already lifeless) the dying man drew me towards him nearer and nearer,
till his lips almost touched my ear, and, in a voice now firm, now
splitting into gasp and hiss, thus he said, "I have summoned you to gaze
on your own work! You have stricken down my life at the moment when it
was most needed by my children, and most serviceable to mankind. Had
I lived a few years longer, my children would have entered on manhood,
safe from the temptations of want and undejected by the charity
of strangers. Thanks to you, they will be penniless orphans.
Fellow-creatures afflicted by maladies your pharmacopoeia had failed
to reach came to me for relief, and they found it. 'The effect of
imagination,' you say. What matters, if I directed the imagination to
cure? Now you have mocked the unhappy ones out of their last chance of
life. They will suffer and perish. Did you believe me in error? Still
you knew that my object was research into truth. You employed against
your brother in art venomous drugs and a poisoned probe. Look at me! Are
you satisfied with your work?"

I sought to draw back and pluck my arm from the dying man's grasp. I
could not do so without using a force that would have been inhuman. His
lips drew nearer still to my