BRITISH COUNCIL DIAGNOSIS OF DEATH LYRICS

 
Read the story.
A diagnosis of death
by Ambrose Bierce
'I am not so superstitious as some of your
physicians - men of science, as you are pleased to
be called,' said Hawver, replying to an accusation
that had not been made. 'Some of you - only a
few, I confess - believe in the immortality of the
soul, and in apparitions which you have not the
honesty to call ghosts. I go no further than a
conviction that the living are sometimes seen
where they are not, but have been - where they
have lived so long, perhaps so intensely, as to
have left their impress on everything about them. I
know, indeed, that one's environment may be so
affected by one's personality as to yield, long
afterward, an image of one's self to the eyes of
another. Doubtless the impressing personality has
to be the right kind of personality as the perceiving
eyes have to be the right kind of eyes - mine, for
example.'
'Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensations
to the wrong kind of brains,' said Dr. Frayley,
smiling.
Thank you; one likes to have an expectation
gratified; that is about the reply that I supposed
you would have the civility to make.'
'Pardon me. But you say that you know. That is a
good deal to say, don't you think? Perhaps you
will not mind the trouble of saying how you
learned.'
'You will call it an hallucination,' Hawver said, 'but
that does not matter.' And he told the story.
'Last summer I went, as you know, to pass the hot
weather term in the town of Meridian. The relative
at whose house I had intended to stay was ill, so I
sought other quarters. After some difficulty I
succeeded in renting a vacant dwelling that had
been occupied by an eccentric doctor of the name
of Mannering, who had gone away years before,
no one knew where, not even his agent. He had
built the house himself and had lived in it with an
old servant for about ten years. His practice, never
very extensive, had after a few years been given
up entirely. Not only so, but he had withdrawn
himself almost altogether from social life and
become a recluse. I was told by the village doctor,
about the only person with whom he held any
relations, that during his retirement he had
devoted himself to a single line of study, the result
of which he had expounded in a book that did not
commend itself to the approval of his professional
brethren, who, indeed, considered him not entirely
sane. I have not seen the book and cannot now
recall the title of it, but I am told that it expounded
a rather startling theory. He held that it was
possible in the case of many a person in good
health to forecast his death with precision, several
months in advance of the event. The limit, I think,
was eighteen months. There were local tales of
his having exerted his powers of prognosis, or
perhaps you would say diagnosis; and it was said
that in every instance the person whose friends he
had warned had died suddenly at the appointed
time, and from no assignable cause. All this,
however, has nothing to do with what I have to tell;
I thought it might amuse a physician.
'The house was furnished, just as he had lived in
it. It was a rather gloomy dwelling for one who was
neither a recluse nor a student, and I think it gave
something of its character to me - perhaps some
of its former occupant's character; for always I felt
in it a certain melancholy that was not in my
natural disposition, nor, I think, due to loneliness. I
had no servants that slept in the house, but I have
always been, as you know, rather fond of my own
society, being much addicted to reading, though
little to study. Whatever was the cause, the effect
was dejection and a sense of impending evil; this
was especially so in Dr. Mannering's study,
although that room was the lightest and most airy
in the house. The doctor's life-size portrait in oil
hung in that room, and seemed completely to
dominate it. There was nothing unusual in the
picture; the man was evidently rather good
looking, about fifty years old, with iron-grey hair, a
smooth-shaven face and dark, serious eyes.
Something in the picture always drew and held my
attention. The man's appearance became familiar
to me, and rather "haunted" me.
'One evening I was passing through this room to
my bedroom, with a lamp - there is no gas in
Meridian. I stopped as usual before the portrait,
which seemed in the lamplight to have a new
expression, not easily named, but distinctly
uncanny. It interested but did not disturb me. I
moved the lamp from one side to the other and
observed the effects of the altered light. While so
engaged I felt an impulse to turn round. As I did so
I saw a man moving across the room directly