What I am now about to relate I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.

My memory is to be depended on.

Like other old men, I recollect events which happened at the beginning of my career far more clearly than events which happened only two or three years since.
Good Mr.Wagner had been ailing for many months; but the doctors had no immediate fear of his death.

He proved the doctors to be mistaken; and took the liberty of dying at a time when they all declared that there was every reasonable hope of his recovery.

When this affliction fell upon his wife, I was absent from the office in London on a business errand to our branch-establishment at Frankfort-on-the-Main, directed by Mr.Wagner's partners.