medical specialists who attended him soon pronounced his case to
be a hopeless one of cerebral collapse. He should have rested
earlier from both his crowded teaching and his composing.

Slowly, but with terrible sureness, his brainpower was beginning
to crumble away and his mind became as that of a little child.
Day after day he would sit near a window, turning over the pages
of one of his beloved books of fairy-tales, an infinitely moving
and tragic figure.

Time went by and the delicately poised intellect grew more and
more dimmed, until at last he hardly recognised his dearest
friends. A few months before the end his physical strength,
hitherto well preserved, began to fail, until at last he sank
rapidly, dying at 9 o'clock in the evening of January 23rd, 1908,
at the age of forty-six, in the Westminster Hotel, New York, in
the presence of his devoted wife.

A simple service was later held at St. George's Episcopal Church,
and he was buried on the Sunday following his death. His grave is
on an open hilltop of his Peterboro property that he loved, and
is marked by a granite boulder on which is a simple bronze tablet
bearing the lines inscribed at the head of one of his last
pieces, _From a Log Cabin_ (_Op_. 62, _No_. 9), an unconscious
prophesy of his own tragic end:--

_A house of dreams untold,
It looks out over the whispering tree-tops
And faces the setting sun_.