There are many references in my mother's diaries and letters to my
father's enforced monotony, and also to his gradually failing health,
which, by the very instinct of loving alarm, we none of us analyzed
as fatal; though, from his expression of face, if for no other reason,
I judge he himself understood it perfectly. Death sat with him, at his
right hand, long before he allowed his physical decline to change his
mode of life. He tried to stem the tide setting against him, because
it is the drowning man's part, even if hopeless. He walked a great
deal upon the high hill-ridge behind the house, his dark, quietly
moving figure passing slowly across the dim light of the mingled sky
and branches, as seen from the large lawn, around which the embowered
terraces rose like an amphitheatre. A friend tells me that, from a
neighboring farm, he sometimes watched my father in an occupation
which he had undertaken for his health. A cord of wood had been cut
upon the hill, and he deliberately dragged it to the lower level of
his dwelling, two logs at a time, by means of a rope. Along the ridge
and down the winding pine-flanked path he slowly and studiously
stepped, musing, looking up, stopping to solve some point of plot or
morals; and meanwhile the cord of wood changed its abiding-place as
surely as water may wear away a stone. But his splendid vigor paled,
his hair grew snowy white, before the end. My mother wrote to him in
the following manner from time to time, when he was away for change of
scene:--
September 9, 1860.
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