he spent the
winter there.

Soon after his arrival, he caught cold and had two illnesses one after
the other, enteric fever and inflammation of the lungs. At one time his
condition was so bad that the doctors had hardly any hope that he would
ever rise from his bed again. Despite the fact that his temperature
went up very high, he was conscious all the time; he dictated some
reflections every day, and deliberately prepared for death.

The whole family was with him, and we all took turns in helping to nurse
him. I look back with pleasure on the nights when it fell to me to be on
duty by him, and I sat in the balcony by the open window, listening
to his breathing and every sound in his room. My chief duty, as the
strongest of the family, was to lift him up while the sheets were being
changed. When they were making the bed, I had to hold him in my arms
like a child.

I remember how my muscles quivered one day with the exertion. He looked
at me with astonishment and said:

"You surely don't find me heavy? What nonsense!"

I thought of the day when he had given me a bad time at riding in the
woods as a boy, and kept asking, "You're not tired?"

Another time during the same illness he wanted me to carry him
down-stairs in my arms by the winding stone staircase.

"Pick me up as they do a baby and carry me."

He had not a grain of fear that I might stumble and kill him. It was all
I could do to insist on his being carried down in an arm-chair by three
of us.

Was my father afraid of death?

It is impossible to answer the question in one word. With his tough
constitution and physical strength, he always instinctively fought not
only against death, but against old age. Till the last year of his life
he never gave in, but always did everything for himself and even rode on
horseback.

To suppose, therefore, that he had no instinctive fear of death is out
of the question. He had that fear, and in a very high degree, but he was
constantly fighting to overcome it.

Did he succeed?

I can answer definitely yes. During his illness he talked a great deal
of death and prepared himself for it firmly and deliberately. When he
felt that he was getting weaker, he wished to say good-by to everybody,
and he called us all separately to his bedside, one after the other, and
gave his last words of advice to each. He was so weak that he spoke in a
half-whisper, and when he had said good-by to one, he had to rest for a
while and c