THE LONGEST JOURNEY.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 456, 22 March 1890, Page 4

THE LONGEST JOURNEY.

A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. Tis the slow siege which

disease makes, upon your nerves which makes your great disease. You live sometimes upon theconfines of insanity. To be half sane, half mad, and to have reason

enough to know when you stand upon the border-line, when you have over stepped it —‘ to know the change and feel it—’twas never said in rhyme.’ You awake from a momentary doze, your nurse, your kind relation—sister, mother, aunt, it may be—is dozing opposite, her feet resting on a chair. A light from the next room sends long shadows of chairs and tables across the floor. It is some eight, or half-past, the cheeriest hour of the day. A sudden sense of renewed strength warms you. After all. is nob this like those childish sicknesses of a day or two, of some bad hour of pain, of a quick relief, and of a slow and peaceful convalescence? Surely you, too, are just arriving at this stage —you have turned the corner. When awakes you wili tell her how much better you feel. When even as the thought leaves you, the change begins. Those shadows, so cheerful, so homelike a moment ago, have grown alive, they are stealing towards you. With a horrible alternation, that fly-trap hanging from the ceiling is one moment only a patchwork of wool, at another it is a human head dripping blood, mowing at you, mocking you. The chairs have bony hands, the shadows dance about you. And yet your reason is really unshaken all the time. The things shift and change ; you do not. You know what they really are. But there is the gory head opposite you all the time Its eyes never leave you. Drop, drop ; how regularly the blood falls ! The twisted leaves and branches on the paper of the walls are all living, moving like eels through water, or like those monstrous shapes which microscopes reveal.

As day followed day, I began to see more clearly (or to feel, perhaps), from my own condition and the faces of those about me, chat!was aboutbo pub thegreat question to the proof. The full rage of the fever has passed; it had more than run its allotted stage. My brain was less violently affected. The delirium which I now had was more, I imagine, that of weakness and bloodlessness than a high frenzied state. Still things about me moved and changed, became alive or died altogether out of sight. I myself passed through all stages of keen thought and faint half-consciousness, questioning sometimes, 1 remember, as to what was to be my fate if, or I may have even said when, that thin membrane which held in the pulses of my heart were to break. And now a violent pain began in a vein ot my leg—thrombosis, blood-clotting, I think the doctors call it—and had to be relieved by leeches. I suppose I could ill bear the loss of blood.

It was dark, about eleven o’clock, as I imagine. One friend who had been with me long was compelled bo travel back to England, and was taking his leave, when a violent convulsion seized me. It shook me as a man might be shaken by a giant; shook all the bed and made the windows rattle; then, as it died down it left me-I say nob with the fear or the feeling—but with the certainty that I was dying. By that absolute certainty I felt I could measure the difference of all other conditions when I may have fancied death near, and saw how obstinate really is the hold we keep on life. We never, I could almost say, realise what life is till it is there. Bub here it is now. The supreme moment had opened at last. All my doubts, all my hopes, my prayers (which had not been wanting), the eternal shuttlecock of arguments pro and con. would receive their answer now, in one minute, in one second, in one fraction of a second, may be.

It is unspeakable—that last moment of all earthly feeling. Such faint foreshadowings of it as I had been able to construct by my imagination, aided by the experietice of accidents which bring, as the saying is, ‘ your heart into your mouth,’ these were as nothing beside what I now felt. Wh.it they from a far off suggested I now deemed an absolute certainty. The sensation is too awful to be called mere fear. But the sheer impossibility of escape is a stimulus to your self-control. You are in no danger of dying abjectly. It gives you no pleasure at such a time to be able, as it were, to wrap your cloak around you. It gave me none, at least. But still I can honestly say that I felt not the least temptation bo make an end like a cur. Nothing can touch you further. You are sinking, sinking into night. But it is not a whit more difficult to go down gently and with an even voice than with tears and lamentations. Then—for even on the most dreadful thoughts the mind will not dwell persistently other iduas obtruded. After all, I did not know that death meant annihilation. In the soberest moment it seems to me now more likely that the mind does not perish with the body more likely than that it does. Suppose this were so. What ad venture, what journey, could ever equal that which I am now embarking on ? A wild leap of curiosity thus intervened for an appreciable portion of that eternal second into which all these sensations were crowded. But it is succeeded by another thought almost wholly painful. I had sat by death-beds, and now imagination flew outside my own individuality, and centred in those who in a moment would be standing by mine. I heard with their ears the rattling breath and the one long sigh which ends it all. This is the worst thought of all. I had a horror of my approaching corpse. I would have given millions to die alone. Why cannot we all ? It were a kindness to go away before the last breath was spent.

*■»•** -if * * That I did not die is of course.