; but Mary's busy with the poor
young thing, mere child she is, too, to go through such a night; and,
somehow, I don't like to be left alone after such a sight as that!"

* * * * *

"Tom!" said Mark, as they sat smoking in silence, after breakfast, in
the study. "Tom!"

"Yes, sir!"

"That was an awful death-bed, Tom!"

Tom was silent.

"I don't mean that he died hard, as we say; but so young, Tom. And I
suppose poets' souls are worth something, like other people's--perhaps
more. I can't understand 'em; but my Mary seems to, and people, like
her, who think a poet the finest thing in the world. I laugh at it all
when I am jolly, and call it sentiment and cant: but I believe that they
are nearer heaven than I am: though I think they don't quite know where
heaven is, nor where" (with a wicked wink, in spite of the sadness of
his tone)--"where they themselves are either."

"I'll tell you, sir. I have seen men enough die--we doctors are hardened
to it: but I have seen unprofessional deaths--men we didn't kill
ourselves; I have seen men drowned, shot, hanged, run over, and worse
deaths than that, sir, too;--and, somehow, I never felt any death like
that man's. Granted, he began by trying to set the world right, when he
hadn't yet set himself right; but wasn't it some credit to see that the
world was wrong?"

"I don't know that. The world's a very good world."

"To you and me; but there are men who have higher notions than I of
what this world ought to be; and, for aught I know, they are right.
That Aberalva curate, Headley, had; and so had Briggs, in his own way.
I thought him once only a poor discontented devil, who quarrelled with
his bread and butter because he hadn't teeth to eat it with: but there
was more in the fellow, coxcomb as he was. 'Tisn't often that I let
that croaking old bogy, Madam might have been, trouble me; but I cannot
help thinking that if, fifteen years ago, I had listened to his
vapourings more, and bullied him about them less, he might have been
here still."

"You wouldn't have been then. Well for you that you didn't catch his
fever."

"And write verses too? Don't make me laugh, sir, on such a day as this;
I always comfort myself with--'it's no business of mine:' but, somehow,
I can't do so just now." And Tom sat silent, more softened than he had
been for years.

"Let's talk of something else," said Mark at last. "You had the cholera
very bad down there,