They had till then hardly realised how suddenly the call might come. As his biographer says, he had been always ‘so full of life, there had been so much activity of body, so much energy of mind, so much elasticity of spirit, that they had never associated with all this vitality a thought of the stillness of death.’ Now, without warning, the foe was at their very door; and the shadow of his great danger weighed heavily upon them all.