An hour before midnight
on the fifth of February, he passed away: aged eighty-four.
Word of his death was kept from Mrs. Jenkin; and she survived him
no more than nine and forty hours. On the day before her death,
she received a letter from her old friend Miss Bell of Manchester,
knew the hand, kissed the envelope, and laid it on her heart; so
that she too died upon a pleasure. Half an hour after midnight, on
the eighth of February, she fell asleep: it is supposed in her
seventy-eighth year.
Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of
this family were taken away; but taken with such features of
opportunity in time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief
was tempered with a kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was
profound. His pious optimism increased and became touched with
something mystic and filial. 'The grave is not good, the
approaches to it are terrible,' he had written in the beginning of
his mother's illness: he thought so no more, when he had laid
father and mother side by side at Stowting.
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