334 Musings by Camp- Fire and Wayside 



tion from the common fate. Possibly this is a 

 providential preparation, so that our last years may 

 not be marred by fear of that which is inevitable 

 and not distant — that clouds and premature dark- 

 ness and chilly and dismal rains may not overshadow 

 our setting sun. This freedom from care about 

 death is not the result of an intellectual condition, 

 but only a placid habit of mind. Intellectually one 

 becomes accustomed to the idea of the approaching 

 end, and here again death itself is obscured, almost 

 hidden, from the mind, by solicitude for the inter- 

 ests which will be affected by it. It becomes the 

 center of business ramifications. One tries to put 

 his affairs in shape so that they will suffer no harm 

 from his perpetual absence. This is in part, 

 habit. Men will do it who have no family to pro- 

 vide for, or whose sons and daughters are each 

 richer than they. But it has usually the leading 

 motive of love, the interests of children, which 

 come to be more highly prized and solicitously 

 looked after than one's own interests. All these 

 things surround the coming event and hide its out- 

 lines. The fear of death is a panoply of life, which 

 falls away when its uses are gone. Very few people, 

 as they come near to the change, experience any 

 fear of it. In youth I was very much terrified by 

 the descriptions of the horrors of the death-bed, 

 painted by revivalist preachers; but though I have 

 seen many die, I never saw any such scene of physi- 

 cal distress and mental agony. It is a process of 



