I made the best of my way to Florence. But he had
been dead several hours when I arrived. He had waked with a paralytic
attack on him, which deprived him of the power of moving on the left
side, and drawing his face awry, made speech almost impossible to him.
He assured his servant--who was almost immediately with him--speaking
with much difficulty, that it was nothing of any importance, and that
he should soon get over it. But these were the last words he ever
spoke, and in two or three hours afterwards he breathed his last.
Then in a few years more the _crescendo_ wave of trouble took my
mother from me at the age of eighty-three. For the last two or three
years she had entirely lost her memory, and for the last few months
the use of her mental faculties. And she did not suffer much. The last
words she uttered were "Poor Cecilia!"--her mind reverting in her
latest moments to the child whose loss had been the most recent. She
had for years entertained a great horror and dread of the possibility
of being buried alive, in consequence of the very short time allowed
by the law for a body to remain unburied after death; and she had
exacted from me a promise that I would in any case cause a vein to be
opened in her arm after death. In her case there could be no possible
room for the shadow of doubt as to the certainty of death; but I was
bound by my promise, and found some difficulty in the performance of
it.
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