He was very fond of kittens, and always had one on his shoulder. When he lay dead, his kitten would not leave him, and fought and spat to be allowed to remain. Three days before he died, he told me that a bird had been tapping at his window all the morning, saying, "That is a bad omen, you know?" I said I could not agree with him, because he had the habit of feeding the birds of the garden on his window-sill at seven every morning. He replied, "Ah, it was not that window, but another." And I found afterwards this little verse scribbled on the margin of his journal—
"Swallow, pilgrim swallow,
Beautiful bird with purple plume,
That, sitting upon my window-sill,
Repeating each morn at the dawn of day
That mournful ditty so wild and shrill,—
Swallow, lovely swallow, what would'st thou say,
On my casement-sill at the break of day?"
The day before his death (Sunday afternoon), the 19th of October, the last walk he ever took, he saw a little robin drowning in a tank in the garden. Crowds of birds were sitting around it on the trees, watching it drown, and doing nothing for it. He got Dr. Baker to get it out, and warmed it in his own hands, and put it in his fur coat, and made a fuss till it was quite restored, then put it in a cage to be kept and tended till well enough to fly away again.
The last night, the chief talk at dinner was about General Booth's article—the first that came out in the Pall Mall Budget—of "How to relieve the Millions." He took the greatest possible interest in it, because (as he said) they could get at people that no clergyman of any Church could get at, and it sounded such a sensible plan. He said to me, "When you and I get to London, and are quite free and settled, we will give all our spare time to that." This is the man who is supposed to have killed and crushed everything as he went about in triumph over the world.
In point of fact, the "Richard Burton" described by part of the press, notably by the Saturday Review—the Richard Burton quoted by a great portion of the people who professed to know him so well, and really hardly knew him at all, never existed—was a man I never knew and never saw.
To the last breath, there was never a saner, or a sounder, or a truer judgment in any man who walked this earth. He saw and knew all the recesses of men's minds and actions.
All those six weeks I was very uneasy to hear him talking more than ever agnostically at the table, and to our surroundings, and to witness the conflict going on within himself in the privacy of our own rooms, because I had been warned by people who have experience in these matters, that it would be the case the nearer he was to death; and yet his health seemed so well. It never struck me that death could be so near. He said once to me, after an unusual burst at tea, which had made me sad, "Do I hurt you when I talk like that?" And I smiled, and said rather sadly, "Well, yes; it always appears to me like speaking against our very best friend." He got a little pale, and said, "Well, I promise you that, after I am free from the Government and from our present surroundings, I won't talk like that any more." And I said, "How I long for that time to come!" And he answered, "So do I."
I realized the following quotation about prayer:—
"The time may be delayed, the manner may be unexpected, but the answer is sure to come. Nor a tear of sacred sorrow, not a breath of holy desire poured out in prayer to God, will ever be lost; but in God's own time and way it will be wafted back again, in clouds of mercy, and fall in showers of blessings on you, and those for whom you pray."