He sat up in a chair by the fire much of the time, and only on the last day stayed entirely in bed.
"During the sickness he always showed pleasure when his wife sat by his side, and on one of the last days he managed to express, in spite of his difficulty with words, how long and happy they had lived together.

The sight of his grandchildren always brought the brightest smile to his face.

On the last day he saw several of his friends and took leave of them.
"Only at the last came pain, and this was at once relieved by ether, and in the quiet sleep this produced he gradually faded away in the evening of Thursday, April 27, 1882.
"Thirty-five years earlier he wrote one morning in his journal: 'I said, when I awoke, after some more sleepings and wakings I shall lie on this mattress sick; then dead; and through my gay entry they will carry these bones.

Where shall I be then?
I lifted my head and beheld the spotless orange light of the morning streaming up from the dark hills into the wide universe.'" After a few more sleepings and a few more wakings we shall all lie dead, every living soul on this broad earth,--all who, at this mathematical point in time called the present, breathe the breath of life will pass away; but even now the new generation is springing into life; within the next hour five thousand bodies will be born into the world to perpetuate mankind; the whole lives by the constant renewal of its parts; but the individual, what becomes of the individual?
The five thousand bodies that are born within the hour take the place of the something less than five thousand bodies that die within the hour; the succession is preserved; the life of the aggregate is assured; but the individual, what becomes of the individual?
Is he immortal, and if immortal whence came he and whither does he go?
if immortal, whence come these new souls which are being delivered on the face of the globe at the rate of nearly a hundred a minute?
Are they from other worlds, exiled for a time to this, or are they souls revisiting their former habitation?
Hardly the latter, for more are coming than going.
One midsummer night, while leaning over the rail of an ocean steamer and watching the white foam thrown up by the prow, the expanse of dark, heaving water, the vast dome of sky studded with the brilliant jewels of space, an old man stopped by my side and we talked of the grandeur of nature and the mysteries of life and death, and he said, "My wife and I once had three boys, whom we loved better than life; one by one they were taken from us,--they all died, and my wife and I were left alone in the world; but after a time a boy was born to us and we gave him the name of the oldest who died, and then another came and we gave him the name of my second boy, and then a third was born and we gave him the name of our youngest;--and so in some mysterious way our three boys have come back to us; we feel that they went away for a little while and returned.

I have sometimes looked in their eyes and asked them if anything they saw or heard seemed familiar, whether there was any faint fleeting memories of other days; they say 'no;' but I am sure that their souls are the souls of the boys we lost." And why not?
Is it not more than likely that there is but one soul which dwells in all things animate and inanimate, or rather, are not all things animate and inanimate but manifestations of the one soul, so that the death of an individual is, after all, but the suppression of a particular manifestation and in no sense a release of a separate soul; so that the birth of a child is but a new manifestation in physical form of the one soul, and in no sense the apparition of an additional soul?
It is difficult to think otherwise.