Whether to believe those people, or whether to laugh at their predictions; whether to tell my wife, or whether to continue silent,—­these questions tormented me through many wakeful nights and dreary days.  My fears were in nowise allayed by a letter which’ I received one day in January from Gertrude Fellows.

“Why don’t you read it aloud?  What’s the news?” asked Alison.  But at one glance over the opening page I folded the sheet, and did not read it till I could lock myself into the library alone.  The letter ran:—­

“I have been much disturbed lately on your behalf.  My mother and your brother Joseph appear to me nearly every day, and charge me with some message to you which I cannot distinctly grasp.  It seems to be clear, however, as far as this:  that some calamity is to befall you in the spring,—­in May, I should say.  It seems to me to be of the nature of death.  I do not learn that you can avoid it, but that they desire you to be prepared for it.”

After receiving this last warning, certain uncomfortable words filed through my brain for days together:—­

“Set thine house in order, for thou shalt surely die.”

“Never knew you read your Bible so much in all your life,” said Alison, with a pretty pout.  “You’ll grow so good that I can’t begin to keep up with you.  When I try to read my polyglot, the baby comes and bites the corners, and squeals till I put it away and take him up.”

As the winter wore away I arrived at this conclusion:  If I were in fact destined to death in the spring, my wife could not help herself or me by the knowledge of it.  If events proved that I was deluded in the dread, and I had shared it with her, she would have had all her pain and anxiety to no purpose.  In either case I would insure her happiness for these few months; they might be her last happy months.  At any rate happiness was a good thing, and she could not have too much of it.  To say that I myself felt no uneasiness as to the event would be affectation.  The old sword of Damocles hung over me.  The hair might hold, but it was a hair.

As the winter passed,—­it seemed to me as if winter had never passed so rapidly before,—­I found it natural to watch my health with the most careful scrutiny; to avoid improper food and undue excitement; to refrain from long and perilous journeys; to consider whether each new cook who entered the family might have occasion to poison me.  It was an anomaly which I did not observe at the time, that while in my heart of hearts I expected to breathe my last upon the second of May, I yet cherished a distinct plan of fighting, cheating, persuading, or overmatching death.

I closed a large speculation on which I had been inclined, in the summer, to “fly”; Alison could never manage petroleum ventures.  I wound up my business in a safe and systematic manner.  “Hotchkiss must mean to retire,” people said.  I revised my will, and held one long and necessary conversation with my wife about her future, should “anything happen” to me.  She listened and planned without tears or exclamations; but after we had finished the talk, she crept up to me with a quiet, puzzled sadness that I could not bear.