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The tableau, as it presented itself about his bedside now, arim, but even in these last hours of his life he appreciated it He had always arded life as a joke--a very serious joke, but a joke for all that--a whi played by the Great Arbiter on hue; and this last count in his own life, as it was solereatest joke of all The a 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 ht have called, at another tireat adventure

That he was dying did not chill him, or make him afraid, or put a tre off the e of his thirty-six years of life appalled him Those years, because he had spent a sufficient nuiven him a philosophy and viewpoint of his own, both of which he kept unto himself without effort to impress them on other people He believed that life itself was the cheapest thing on the face of all the earth All other things had their limitations

There was so much water and so much land, so many mountains and so many plains, so many square feet to live on and so s could be ued--except life itself "Given tile pair of hu the cheapest of all things, it was true philosophy that life should be the easiest of all things to give up when the necessity ca that Kent was not, and never had been, afraid to die But it does not say that he treasured life a whit less than the ht like a lunatic before going under an anesthetic for the aer No man had loved life more than he No man had lived nearer it

It had been a passion with him Full of dreams, and alith anticipations ahead, no matter how far short realizations fell, he was an optimist, a lover of the sun and the moon and the stars, a worshiper of the forests and of the ht for it, and yet as ready--at the last--to yield it up without a whimper when the fates asked for it