Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/70

58 death—and that means the manner and accompanying circumstances of it—administered to me what was in very reality a rude shock. I knew very little about him. We had seemed from our earliest childhood to have little or nothing in common, and each had gone his own way. Lately he had married, and his wife had died in childbed, the baby succumbing also. For the last five or six years he had practically managed the whole of the Daniel business, and I had not been a soldier, and perhaps I may say a captain, in the Labour army without being well aware how roughly and rigorously he had done it. A severe and neglected cold suddenly developed into violent congestion of the lungs, and a telegram under his name summoned me without delay to his bedside. What followed was beyond expression pitiful. The poor fellow, in his fear that he might be beyond words when I arrived, had dictated a letter to me. The moment I entered, the nurse, at his nervously eager command, read it aloud to me in his presence. It was a passionate appeal to my sense of duty as a man, and my sense of pride as a Daniel, to abjure my lazy and cowardly dilettantism—to take on the management of the business, and to preserve it to our name. I was the last of the Daniels. He could not believe I would let one of the first names in the commerce of England—a name known with honour wherever