The Highland Weekly News

Death is usually preceded by a group of phenomena that has received the name of the death agony. In most cases of disease the beginning of this concluding period is marked by a sudden improvement of the functions. It is the last gleam springing from the dying flame; but soon the eyes become fixed and insensible to the action of light; the nose grows pointed and cold; the mouth, wide open, seems to call for the air that fails it; the cavity within is parched, and the lips, as if withered, cling to the curves of the teeth.

The last moments of respiration are spasmodic, and a wheezing, and sometimes a marked gurgling sound may be heard at some distance, caused by obstruction of the bronchial tubes with a quantity of mucus. The breath is cold, the temperature of the skin lowered. If the heart is examined, we note the weakening of its sounds and pulsations. The hands, placed in its neighborhood, feel no throb.

Such is the physiognomy of a person in the last moments of death, in the greater number of cases; that is, when death follows upon a period of illness of some duration. The death struggle is seldom painful; almost always the patient feels nothing of it. He is plunged into a comatose stupor, so that he is no longer conscious of his situation or sufferings, and he passes insensibly from life to death in a manner that renders it sometimes difficult to fix the exact instant at which a dying person expires. This is true, at least, in chronic maladies, and especially in those that consume the human body slowly and silently.

Yet when the hour of death comes for ardent organizations--for great artists, for instance, and they usually die young-there is a quick and sublime new burst of life in the creative genius. There is no better example of this than the angelic end of Beethoven, who, before he breathed out his soul, that tuneful monad, regained his lost speech and hearing, and spent them in repeating for the last time some of those sweet harmonies which he called his "Prayers to God."

Some diseases, moreover, are most peculiarly marked by the gentleness of the dying agony. Of all the ills that cheat us by pin pricks, consumption is that which longest wears for us the illusive look of health, and best conceals the misery and horror of dying. Nothing can be compared with that hallucination of the senses and that livingness of hope which mark the last days of the consumptive. He takes the burning of his destroying fever for a healthful symptom, he forms his plans and smiles calmly and cheerfully on his friends, and suddenly, some morrow of a quiet night, he falls into a sleep and never wakes.-[Popular Science Monthly.