In those days the Law School course extended over two years only, and it did not call for very hard work on the part of the student, so he was free to pass frequent evenings in my library. I used to go and see him often, for I liked his mother, and I liked to see them sitting side by side, he holding her hand often as he debated vehemently with me the insoluble questions which interested us then. During the second winter I sometimes saw there a brown-eyed girl of perhaps twenty, pretty enough, but with a sharp, nervous manner I did not care for. This was the daughter of the lady who kept the boarding-house; and my friend was polite to her, as he was to all women; he was attentive even, as a young man is wont to be toward a quick-witted girl. But nothing in the manner led me to suppose that he was interested in her more than in any other woman. I did not like her myself, for she struck me as sharp-tongued.
It is true that I saw less of my friend that second winter, being hard at work myself. It was in the spring, two years after our graduation, that I received a letter from him announcing his engagement to the young lady I had seen him with, his landlady’s daughter. My first thought, I remember, was to wonder how his mother would feel at the prospect of another woman’s coming between them. His letter was a long dithyramb, and it declared that never had there been a man so happy, and that great as was his present joy, it was as nothing compared with the delight in store for him. He wrote me that each had loved the other from the first, and each had thought the other did not care, until at last he could bear it no longer; so he had asked her, and got his answer. “You cannot know,” he wrote, “what this is to me. It is my life—it is the making of my life; and if I should die to-night, I should not have lived in vain, for I have tasted joy, and death cannot rob me of that.”
Of course the engagement must needs be long, because he was as yet in no position to support a wife; but he had been admitted to the bar, and he could soon make his way, with the stimulus he had now.
I was called out of town suddenly about that time, and I saw him for a few minutes only before I left New York. He was overflowing with happiness, and he could talk about nothing but the woman he loved—how beautiful she was! how clever! how accomplished! how devoted to his mother! In the midst of his rhapsody he was seized by a fit of violent coughing, and I saw the same danger signal in his cheeks which had preceded the break-down in his senior year. I begged him to take care of himself. With a light laugh he answered that he intended to do so—it was his duty to do so, now that he did not belong to himself.
In the fall, when I came back to the city, I found him in the office of a law firm, the head of which had been an intimate of his father’s. The girl he was to marry went one night a week to dine with her grandmother, and he came to me that evening and talked about her. As the cold weather stiffened, his cough became more frequent, and long before Christmas I was greatly alarmed by it. He consulted a distinguished doctor, who told him that he ought to spend the winter in a drier climate—in Colorado, for example.
It was on Christmas eve that year that he brought me the frog that played the trombone. Ever since the first Christmas of our friendship we had made each other little presents.
“This is hardly worth giving,” he said, as he placed the china shell on the corner of my desk, where it stands to this day. “But it is quaint and it caught my fancy. Besides, I’ve a notion that it is the tune of one of Heine’s lyrics set by Schubert that the fellow is trying to play. And then I’ve a certain satisfaction in thinking that I shall be represented here by a performer of marvelous force of lung, since you seem to think my lungs are weak.”
A severe cough seized him then, but, when he had recovered his breath, he laughed lightly, and said: "That’s the worst one I’ve had this week. However, when the spring warms me up again I shall be all right once more. It wasn’t on me that the spring poet wrote the epitaph:
'It was a cough
That carried him off;
It was a coffin
They carried him off in.'"
“You ought to go away for a month at least,” I urged. “Take a run down South and fill your lungs with the balsam of the pines.”