222 LIFE OF TEGETMEIER 



have said, the offer of a game of dominoes would 

 pacify his most petulant outbreak. 



In the summer of 1909 we persuaded him to 

 leave the big (and but for his daughter and grand- 

 daughter's presence, desolate) house at Finchley, 

 and to live with his son at Hampstead. Here 

 he lived happily enough for nearly two and a 

 half years, failing in mental and bodily powers 

 so gradually that one scarcely noticed a change. 

 Increasing infirmity, however, at last made it 

 desirable that he should receive more skilled 

 attention than was available in an ordinary 

 household, and he was put under the personal 

 care of a neighbouring medical man, with trained 

 nurses to attend to his every want. The last 

 time I saw him he was so (comparatively) strong 

 that I quite anticipated his being with us for 

 some years yet, and we spoke, more in earnest 

 than in joke, of the likelihood of his reaching 

 his hundredth year. And so the end came 

 suddenly — as it nearly always does, or seems 

 to come — and on November 19th, 1912, he 

 passed peacefully, painlessly away ; as his 

 daughter, who was present but not recognised 

 by him, put it, he " just drifted out of life." 

 He was buried in the same grave that held his 

 wife and daughters in the Mary leb one Cemetery, 

 Finchley, on November 23rd, 1912. 



By his death a valuable public servant was 

 lost ; literature and science mourned the loss of 



