Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated.At once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that the thing was done in order to run the water down into his body from his legs and kill him more quickly.He demanded his discharge, though they told him he would die on the stairs, and dragged himself more dead than alive to the cobbler's shop.At the moment of writing this, he is dying at the Temperance Hospital, into which place his stanch friend, the cobbler, moved heaven and earth to have him admitted.
Poor Dan Cullen! A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after knowledge; who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the watches of the night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for the Cause; a patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter unafraid; and in the end, not gigantic enough to beat down the conditions which baffled and stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist, gasping his final agony on a pauper's couch in a charity ward.'For a man to have died who might have been wise and was not, this I call a tragedy.'