A thousand times in his life he had discovered that humor and tragedy were very closely related, and that there were times when only the breadth of a hair separated the two.

Many times he had seen a laugh change suddenly to tears, and tears to laughter.
The tableau, as it presented itself about his bedside now, amused him.
Its humor was grim, but even in these last hours of his life he appreciated it.

He had always more or less regarded life as a joke--a very serious joke, but a joke for all that--a whimsical and trickful sort of thing played by the Great Arbiter on humanity at large; and this last count in his own life, as it was solemnly and tragically ticking itself off, was the greatest joke of all.

The amazed faces that stared at him, their passing moments of disbelief, their repressed but at times visible betrayals of horror, the steadiness of their eyes, the tenseness of their lips--all added to what he might have called, at another time, the dramatic artistry of his last great adventure.
That he was dying did not chill him, or make him afraid, or put a tremble into his voice.

The contemplation of throwing off the mere habit of breathing had never at any stage of his thirty-six years of life appalled him.