354 RETIREMENT AND DEATH CHAP, xi 



He continued to read with delight the Waverley 

 Novels, and the humour of Dean Ramsay's Reminis- 

 cences of Scottish Life never failed to call out his 

 merry laugh. His general health remained good, but 

 his strength, bodily and mental, seemed imperceptibly 

 to ebb away. 



Almost every fine day until 1891 he was wheeled 

 out in a bath -chair and placed in some sunny, 

 sheltered spot where he could watch the mountains 

 and the sea, while his wife sat and read or worked 

 beside him. These daily little journeys continued to 

 give him great pleasure, until at last, in September of 

 that year, his increasing weakness made them no 

 longer possible. Eventually he was unable to bear 

 the fatigue of rising and being dressed, so kept his 

 bed until, on the Qth December, he passed gently 

 away. 



He was buried in the churchyard that surrounds the 

 pretty little church of Llansadwrn, among his wife's 

 people. The spot was a favourite one with him, for it 

 commands on the one side a noble view of the whole 

 range of the high grounds of North Wales from the 

 Orme's Head, through the Snowdon group, down to 

 the far Rivals, and on the other a wide sweep of the 

 undulating plains of Anglesey. It was fitting that one 

 who had loved Wales so ardently, who had spent the 

 best years of his life there, and who had done more 

 than any other writer to unravel at once its geology 

 and its physical geography, should be laid to rest 

 within view of the peak of Snowdon, and within sound 

 of the rush of the tide through the Strait of Menai. 



