From Maxwell Pollock, Esq., No. — Fifth Avenue, New York, to Stephen Cranbrooke, Esq., —— Club, New York.
"May 30, 189-.
"My dear Cranbrooke:
"You will wonder why I follow up our conversation of last evening with a letter; why, instead of speaking, I should write what is left to be said between us two.
"But after a sleepless night, of which my little wife suspects nothing, I am impelled to confide in you—my oldest friend, her friend, although you and she have not yet grown to the comprehension of each other I hoped for when she married me three years ago—a secret that has begun to weigh heavy upon my soul.
"I do not need to remind you that, since our college days, you have known me subject to fits of moodiness and depression upon which you have often rallied me. How many times you have said that a fellow to whom Fate had given health, strength, opportunity, and fortune—and recently the treasure of a lovely and loving wife—has no business to admit the word 'depression' into his vocabulary!
"This is true. I acknowledge it, as I have a thousand times before. I am a fool, a coward, to shrink from what is before me. But I was still more of a fool and a coward when I married her. For her sake, the prospect of my death before this summer wanes impels me to own to you my certainty that my end is close at hand.
"In every generation of our family since the old fellow who came over from England and founded us on Massachusetts soil, the oldest son has been snatched out of life upon the threshold of his thirtieth year. I carried into college with me an indelible impression of the sudden and distressing death of my father, at that period of his prosperous career, and of the wild cry of my widowed mother when she clasped me to her breast, and prayed Heaven might avert the doom from me.
"Everything that philosophy, science, common sense, could bring to the task of arguing me out of a belief in the transmission of this sentence of a higher power to me, has been tried. I have studied, travelled, lived, enjoyed myself in a rational way; have loved and won the one woman upon earth for me, have revelled in her wifely tenderness.
"I have tried to do my duty as a man and a citizen. In all other respects, I believe myself to be entirely rational, cool-headed, unemotional; but I have never been able to down that spectre. He is present at every feast; and, although in perfectly good health, I resolved yesterday to put the question to a practical test. I called at the office of an eminent specialist, whom I had never met, although doubtless he knew my name, as I knew his.