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Updated: June 3, 2025
But old people, I have noticed, those whose days are numbered, whose autumnal friends are fast falling, as if leaf by leaf from the creaking tree, those regularly turn to the obituary column, which, doubtless, is filled with what are "personals" for them. I doubt very much indeed whether any one could read obituaries every day for a year and remain a bad man or woman.
He knew only that all Europe was in mourning! "I suppose I was rather wonderful am, I mean" he said to himself, dazed and happy. Yes, happy. "The fact is, I've got so used to my own work that perhaps I don't think enough of it." He said this as modestly as he could. There was no question now of casually glancing at the obituaries. He could not miss a single line, a single word.
And though I know not by what process this was effected, I can tell you that many obituaries were written in respect of him.
That is why he brings his obituaries to us; that is why he does us the honour of borrowing papers from us; and that is why, on a dull afternoon, he likes to sit in the old sway-back swivel-chair and tell us his theory of the increase in the rainfall, his notion about the influence of trees upon the hot winds, his opinion of the disappearance of the grasshoppers.
Who says we haven't any poetical talent on the Island! Have you ever noticed what heaps of good people die, Anne, dearie? It's kind of pitiful. Here's ten obituaries, and every one of them saints and models, even the men.
And yet Harrington is a man of exceptional intelligence. He would agree with me that infection from book-dust is not an ignoble form of death. I sit there and plot obituaries. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," says the Evening Star, "died yesterday afternoon from ptomaine poisoning, after a very brief illness.
No complaining.... And one other claim I urged in the teeth of this Spirit, which, if it was a human Spirit at all, it could not disregard. Those pigeon-holed obituaries of mine will proclaim to the world, one and all, the virtues of my public life. In spite of my royal earnings, I am not a rich man. I have not accepted wealth without accepting the personal responsibility for it.
He was about to glance at the obituaries; to glance at them in a careless, condescending way, just to see the sort of thing that journalists had written of him. He knew the value of obituaries; he had often smiled at them. He knew also the exceeding fatuity of art criticism, which did not cause him even to smile, being simply a bore.
And the provincial writer of obituaries follows a high authority, another rustic poet, deathless and known throughout the world, who sang of his Hoosier friend "he is not dead but just away." When one enters upon his last role in this world, which all fill in their turn, he becomes in rural journals that personage known throughout the countryside as "the deceased."
Some of them are circumnavigating the planet while he is hitching his rocking chair about his hearth-rug. Some are gazing upon the pyramids while he is staring at his andirons. Some are settling the tariff and fixing the laws of suffrage and taxation while he is dozing over the weather bulletin, and going to sleep over the obituaries in his morning or evening paper.
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