Some time ago, when I was about a decade more remote from my own final bulletin than I am today, I published
in a national magazine a part of my private collection of deathbed utterances. These Passing Remarks, as I called
them, seemed to strike a sympathetic chord. I heard from at least a hundred fellow-collectors, many of whom generously passed on to me their favorite specimens. The communication I most treasure came from a New England correspondent who wrote that when his father was dying the nurse put her ear down close to his face to see whether she could detect any breathing. The old gentleman opened his eyes and said: "Boo!" My informant added, quite properly, "I envy him that." So do I. He also enclosed an epitaph found on a New England tombstone commemorating a youth who died at twenty-one. It reads: "Don't take on so. It's all right." These are true Yankee farewells. My fellow-hobbyists made me feel that I was one of a world-wide fraternity of collectors of Last Words. This sense of community has now been reconfirmed, and most pleasantly, by the reading of the book you hold in your hands. It will at once take an honorable place on the slim shelf holding anthologies in this odd, delightful field.