cliv MEMOIR 



(Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving the house after twenty-two years of 

 service, it was not unnatural that he should return to dreams 

 of Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he told me) on ' a real 

 honeymoon tour.' He had not been alone with his wife ' to 

 speak of/ he added, since the birth of his children. But now 

 he was to enjoy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these 

 last days, that she was his ' Heaven on earth.' Now he was to 

 revisit Italy, and see all the pictures and the buildings and the 

 scenes that he admired so warmly, and lay aside for a time the 

 irritations of his strenuous activity. Nor was this all. A 

 trifling operation was to restore his former lightness of foot ; 

 and it was a renovated youth that was to set forth upon this 

 reenacted honeymoon. 



The operation was performed ; it was of a trifling character, 

 it seemed to go well, no fear was entertained ; and his wife was 

 reading aloud to him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him 

 to wander in his mind. It is doubtful if he ever recovered a 

 sure grasp upon the things of life ; and he was still unconscious 

 when he passed away, June the twelfth, 1885, in the fifty-third 

 year of his age. He passed ; but something in his gallant 

 vitality had impressed itself upon his friends, and still impresses. 

 Not from one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale 

 of how the imagination refuses to accept our loss and instinctively 

 looks for his reappearing, and how memory retains his voice 

 and image like things of yesterday. Others, the well-beloved 

 too, die and are progressively forgotten : two years have passed 

 since Fleeming was laid to rest beside his father, his mother and 

 his Uncle John ; and the thought and the look of our friend 

 still haunts us. 



