Thus, amidst uncertainties and temptations, arrived the autumn with its rains. One day, a packet-ship arriving from Nova Scotia with meat, thus alleviating the city’s starvation, I purchased a salted ham-hock with Sally, and, by her side, stripped it for cooking. A small portion of the meat I took above-stairs for Dr. Trefusis, who, notwithstanding his frequent repetition of tags regarding vacancy and doom, improved tremendously.

He consumed the ham with considerable stomach, and, while licking his fingers, declared, “We devour meat, so that meat we may remain . . . though we hope to keep the spirit stuffed like herbs in the midst of it, for without that, the dish is simply flesh.” He waited.

“Sir,” said I, “final words are futile. You are not close to death.”

“Unless you were to bludgeon me with the thigh-bone,” he invited, smiling sweetly and batting his eyes.

I rose and took his plate, little entertained with jests on matters of such gravity.

“Augustus,” said he, “what is happening in the world outside these walls?”

“We are better supplied with meat,” I said.

“So I see.”

“The Navy captured a rebel ship off the coast of New Haven, filled with sheep and beeves.”

“Bravo.”

“We have received supplies from Nova Scotia.” I considered. “The officers are discussing where to erect the winter quarters for the soldiers.”

“I see.”

“Mrs. Platt has begun her third revolution of plates around the house, stacked one atop the other.”

“Excellent,” said Dr. Trefusis. “Anything further?”

“We are playing a suite by a sapper-composer.”

He regarded me quizzically. “By ‘sapper,’ you mean of the siege-engineer species?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who tunnels under walls?”

“Yes, sir,” said I. “He is of the Corps of Engineers. He is applauded for his ingenuity.”

“As well he might be.”

“I wish one could compose in darkness,” said I. “And play music without others observing.”

“Ah, yes. Fancy the effect upon his melodies, laboring with his muse there so much closer both to Hell and the ruddy forge of Vulcan.”

“He must have a strong acquaintance with earth.”

Dr. Trefusis looked at me with more seriousness, now. “What was it like,” he asked, “when you dug ditches for the rebels?”

I did not meet his eye. “One might write a Symphony on the Four Strata,” I said.

“I forget that you had a hand in constructing the fortifications on Bunker Hill.”

I looked at my hands, which had grown harder over the summer. “It was difficult work,” I answered. “I was not accustomed to the tools.”

“We did not always serve thee well in your training,” said Dr. Trefusis.

“You little anticipated I would be packing dirt in redoubts to combat His Majesty’s Army.”

“That was not our intention,” said Dr. Trefusis.

And of a sudden, “What was?” I asked. “What did you wish to make of me?”

“Octavian,” said he, stumbling and using my name, “we . . . we did not know. We would, I suppose, eventually have taken you to France. To present you at court there.”

“Why France, sir?”

“The English would have showed admiration for us of the College; but the French would have shown adoration for you. Women would have built their hair into Negro Violinist coifs. They would have written indecencies to you upon their fans. There would have been theories advanced as to what your excellences told young philosophers about the nobility of man.”

I nodded. I knew not why, but even these meditations on my strengths filled me with sensations of exhaustion and discomfort.

I gazed upon my hands; upon the knuckles, and upon the palms.

“What,” I asked Dr. Trefusis, “is color?”

“Epicurus maintains that everything we see, we see because a fine film of atomies is constantly shed by all matter, a sort of mist of particles which strikes the eye.”

“So color, sir, is a shedding of the skin.”

“I suppose, my boy, one might phrase it thus.”

“Color is the loss of person. Dispersed into the air.”

Dr. Trefusis smiled.

I said, “And in order for us to be seen, we must constantly be losing some part of our being.”

“Indeed. We are ever diminishing,” assented Dr. Trefusis. “Like a garment fretted by the moth.”

“And in order for us to see, we must constantly be assaulted by what others shed.”

“As surely, saith Descartes, as if we were struck in the face.”

This I considered. “If one,” I ventured, “were underground, in complete darkness . . . If one were a celebrated sapper-composer who had tunneled down deep into the bedrock, there to compose descriptive symphonies on the four strata . . . Would such a sapper-composer, engulfed in darkness, still be diminished?”

“You cannot stop the superficies of objects from evaporation,” he said. “Light or dark, the particles still fly off the surfaces of things.”

“And yet,” said I, “beneath the surface of the earth, the sapper-composer would not constantly be exhausted by the particles striking the eye. The eye would have rest. No longer would the face receive blows.”

Dr. Trefusis took my arm and turned me to face him. “Octavian,” he said, his look full of sobriety, “I hope thou shalt never retreat beneath the ground. The sun is thy inheritance. The sky is thy birthright. Stay here, my boy, and with the conversation of mankind, rejoice in the light.”

I could not but give thanks for the trill of emotion in his voice, which spake so sincerely of his regard and affection. Said I, “More last words?”

“No. First words.” He held forth his arm. “Help me rise,” he said. “I shall walk across the room.”

“Are you feeling well, sir?” said I.

“In a world, Octavian, where composers tunnel beneath us and men kill men for sheep, too much transpires too quickly for one to lie long abed.”

He smiled; and I suppose I smiled too.

I helped him rise. He was not firm on his legs, not having walked for several weeks. “I wish to make my way down the stairs,” said he.

“That is inadvisable, sir,” I answered.

“Augustus — support me, and I shall walk.”

It was a difficult but triumphant descent. His mass hung upon my arm, for he supported but little of his own weight.

Mrs. Platt waited for us down in the foyer. “Dr. Trefusis,” she said, “I am delighted to see you are mending.”

“I am come down to see your third strata,” he said, tottering and wincing. “We were speaking of geology.”

“My strata?” said she.

“Your noble experiment in sedimentary cuisine,” he said. “Fancy to yourself how invaluable the record might be someday of your past meals, as you dig your way down through a stack, with each ridge of dried gravy or leaf of salad speaking to your heart and your innermost parts of former days.”

“I am sure,” she said, “I do not like your mockery. Nor your speaking of the gut to a lady.”

But she did not seem displeased by his recovery, and clapped when he reached the bottom step, and led him into the parlor, there to rest and take tea.

So Dr. Trefusis descended out of the obscurity of death through talk of the underworld, and rejoined the conversation of man.