which seems to bear the stamp of truth upon it, he thus records the
grim story which he had to report to the assembled guests on his
return: "I went to Mr. Sterne's lodgings; the mistress opened the
door. I enquired how he did; she told me to go up to the nurse. I went
into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in
five he said, 'Now it is come.' He put up his hand as if to stop a
blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and
lamented him very much."

Thus, supported by a hired nurse, and under the curious eyes of a
stranger, Sterne breathed his last. His wife and daughter were far
away; the convivial associates "who were all very sorry and lamented
him very much," were for the moment represented only by "John;" and
the shocking tradition goes that the alien hands by which the "dying
eyes were closed," and the "decent limbs composed," remunerated
themselves for the pious office by abstracting the gold sleeve-links
from the dead man's wrists. One may hope, indeed, that this last
circumstance is to be rejected as sensational legend, but even without
it the story of Sterne's death seems sad enough, no doubt. Yet it is,
after all, only by contrast with the excited gaiety of his daily
life in London that his end appears so forlorn. From many a "set of
residential chambers," from many of the old and silent inns of the
lawyers, departures as lonely, or lonelier, are being made around us
in London every year: the departures of men not necessarily kinless or
friendless, but living solitary lives, and dying before their friends
or kindred can be summoned to their bedsides. Such deaths, no doubt,
are often contrasted in conventional pathos with that of the husband
and father surrounded by a weeping wife and children; but the more
sensible among us construct no tragedy out of a mode of exit which
must have many times entered as at least a possibility into the