A morning or two after, the old man was again seated at his bedside, trying to amuse himself with a book; but with little success, for his eyes were weak.
“I shall let well alone,” growled the old man; “and if they want to operate, they may cut and carve someone else. I shall do for the few years I have to live; but they might find a poor fellow a scrap of snuff, hang ’em!”
“Here, you Number 19, into bed with you directly!”
“Why, I’m only just up,” grumbled Matt, who was the said number.
“Never mind, old fellow,” said the speaker; “be smart, for they will be after you directly.”
Old Matt shivered and trembled, and his lips moved as he slowly returned to his bed, and there lay waiting. He had almost determined to be content, and bear his burden to the grave; for, said he, “I can’t live much longer.” But then he thought of the wondrous skill and care of those in whose hands he would be, and of the rest that would afterwards be his were his life spared.
“I won’t turn coward now,” he muttered, letting his eyes rest upon some flowers in a window near his bed, and gazing at them in a strange earnest way,—“No, I won’t turn coward, not even if they kill me. But that’s hard to think of, that is. Mine has been a rough life, and I’ve put up with a deal; but I never tired of it—not to say thoroughly tired of it, though I’ve been very near more than once; and I should like to keep grinding on for a long time yet. Life’s sweet, somehow, when you’ve got friends, and I seem to have found ’em at last. I should have liked to have helped him out with that entry, though. Where did I see it?”
The old man paused thoughtfully, and kept passing his hand across his dew-wet forehead; but the memory was still defective, and he sighed wearily: “Why didn’t I begin sooner, or make him begin? Ah, that’s it—that’s it! why don’t we begin hundreds of things sooner, and not leave them till it’s too late!”
The old man paused again, and his lean, bony fingers clutched and clawed restlessly to get at the flowers. But his old train of thought now seemed to have returned, for he continued: “Don’t often see anything about hospital operations, but I have had copy about them—‘Death from the Administration of Chloroform.’ What an ugly word that first is, and what a shiver it seems to give one when we think of it in connection with ourselves, though it seems so little when it has to do with anyone else! Wonder whether any of the old ’stab or piece hands would get hold of it to set, and feel sorry for the battered old stamp they used to laugh at, and whether it would get into the papers if I was to—”
The old man stopped once more, and wiped the dew from his wet forehead.