I have been busy
all my life through, and it would not be well to grow idle at the last.
Do you know what I have been doing this day?'
I shook my head.
'I will tell you. I have been making my will--there is something to
leave; not so very much, but still something.'
'Do not talk of wills,' I said; 'I trust that you may live for many
years.'
He laughed. 'You must think badly of my case, nephew, when you think
that I can be deceived thus. I am about to die as you know well, and I
do not fear death. My life has been prosperous but not happy, for it was
blighted in its spring--no matter how. The story is an old one and not
worth telling; moreover, whichever way it had read, it had all been one
now in the hour of death. We must travel our journey each of us; what
does it matter if the road has been good or bad when we have reached the
goal? For my part religion neither comforts nor frightens me now at the
last. I will stand or fall upon the record of my life. I have done evil
in it and I have done good; the evil I have done because nature and
temptation have been too strong for me at times, the good also because
my heart prompted me to it. Well, it is finished, and after all death
cannot be so terrible, seeing that every human being is born to undergo
it, together with all living things. Whatever else is false, I hold this
to be true, that God exists and is more merciful than those who preach
Him would have us to believe.
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