My friends “lucky-dog’d” me until I began to smirk to myself at my own good fortune.  She visited the constituency and comported herself as if she had been a Member’s wife since infancy, thereby causing my heart to swell with noble pride.  This unparalleled young person compelled me to take my engagement almost seriously.  If I shot forth a jest, it struck against a virtue and fell blunted to the earth.  Indeed, even now I am sorry I can’t marry Eleanor.  But marriage is out of the question.

I have been told by the highest medical authorities that I may manage to wander in the flesh about this planet for another six months.  After that I shall have to do what wandering I yearn for through the medium of my ghost.  There is a certain humourousness in the prospect.  Save for an occasional pain somewhere inside me, I am in the most robust health.

But this same little pain has been diagnosed by the Faculty as the symptom of an obscure disease.  An operation, they tell me, would kill me on the spot.  What it is called I cannot for the life of me remember.  They gave it a kind of lingering name, which I wrote down on my shirt-cuff.

The name or characteristics of the thing, however, do not matter a fig.  I have always hated people who talked about their insides, and I am not going to talk about mine, even to myself.  Clearly, if it is only going to last me six months, it is not worth talking about.  But the quaint fact of its brief duration is worth the attention of a contemplative mind.

It is in order perfectly to focus this attention that I have come to Murglebed-on-Sea.  Here I am alone with the murk and the mud and my own indrawn breath of life.  There are no flowers, blue sky, smiling eyes, and dainty faces—­none of the adventitious distractions of the earth.  There are no Blue-books.  Before the Faculty made their jocular pronouncement I had been filling my head with statistics on pauper lunacy so as to please my constituency, in which the rate has increased alarmingly of late years.  Perhaps that is why I found myself their representative in Parliament.  I was to father a Bill on the subject next session.  Now the labour will fall on other shoulders.  I interest myself in pauper lunacy no more.  A man requires less flippant occupation for the premature sunset of his days.  Well, in Murglebed I can think, I can weigh the pros and cons of existence with an even mind, I can accustom myself to the concept of a Great Britain without Simon de Gex.  M.P.

Of course, when I go I shall “cast one longing, lingering look behind.”  I don’t particularly want to die.  In fact, having otherwise the prospect of an entertaining life, I regard my impending dissolution in the light of a grievance.  But I am not afraid.  I shall go through the dismal formality with a graceful air and as much of a smile on my face as the pain in my inside will physically permit.

My dear but somewhat sober-sided friend Marcus Aurelius says:  “Let death surprise me when it will, and where it will, I may be eumoiros, or a happy man, nevertheless.  For he is a happy man who in his lifetime dealeth unto himself a happy lot and portion.  A happy lot and portion in good inclinations of the soul, good desires, good actions.”