But now there was the new feeling--the last new feeling which we shall any of us experience in this world--that death was not only close at hand, but inevitable.
He felt its numbness stealing up him--stealing up him.

But the head was clear, the brain more than commonly active in producing vivid impressions.
It seemed but yesterday since he was a little boy at his mother's knee, wishing with all the earnestness of his childish heart to be like Abraham, who was called the friend of God, or David, who was said to be the man after God's own heart, or St John, who was called 'the Beloved.' As very present seemed the day on which he made resolutions of trying to be like them; it was in the spring, and some one had brought in cowslips; and the scent of those flowers was in his nostrils now, as he lay a-dying--his life ended, his battles fought, his time for 'being good' over and gone--the opportunity, once given in all eternity, past.
All the temptations that had beset him rose clearly before him; the scenes themselves stood up in their solid materialism--he could have touched the places; the people, the thoughts, the arguments that Satan had urged in behalf of sin, were reproduced with the vividness of a present time.

And he knew that the thoughts were illusions, the arguments false and hollow; for in that hour came the perfect vision of the perfect truth: he saw the 'way to escape' which had come along with the temptation; now, the strong resolve of an ardent boyhood, with all a life before it to show the world 'what a Christian might be'; and then the swift, terrible now, when his naked, guilty soul shrank into the shadow of God's mercy-seat, out of the blaze of His anger against all those who act a lie.
His mind was wandering, and he plucked it back.

Was this death in very deed?
He tried to grasp at the present, the earthly present, fading quick away.

He lay there on the bed--on Sally Dobson's bed in the house-place, not on his accustomed pallet in the lean-to.