receipt of any large sum of money, to make his wife the cash- keeper. The frequency of this, and the dependence which he had on her management of it, tempted her to practice 'the little pilfering temper of a wife ; ' she therefore from time to time accumulated a considerable sum, which Cave knew nothing of. Her last illness was an asthma ; and though she every day grew worse, she reserved this secret from her husband till her breath grew so short, that she had only time to tell him ' she had secreted a part of the money which he occasionally gave her, which she laid out in India bonds.' She was immediately after taken in convulsions, and died before she had time to say where they were hid, or in whose possession they were deposited. Cave on her death made every possible enquiry after his property, but such is the integrity of some friendships ', the bonds were never afterwards found x . (Page 47.)
At Lichfield he used sometimes to recall the memory of past times, and enter into all the boyish sports and gambols of his youth, and it is but a very few years back, that he obliged the master of the school where he had been educated, to restore to the boys, an annual entertainment of Furmenti 2 , which had been practised in his days, but had for some time been discontinued. (Page 66.)
On the Sunday night preceding his death, he was obliged to be turned in the bed by two strong men employed for that purpose. He was at intervals likewise delirious ; and in one of those fits, seeing a friend at the bed-side, he exclaimed, * What,
1 For this anecdote see Life, iv. affected by her death, but in a few
319, where the wife's name is not days lost his sleep and his appetite,
mentioned : ' Her husband said, he which he never recovered.' Works,
was more hurt by her want of con- vi. 433.
fidence in him, than by the loss of 2 Johnson defines furmenty as his money. " I told him," said food made by boiling wheat in milk. Johnson, "that he should console In the Gentleman's Magazine, 1783, himself ; for perhaps the money p. 578 ; 1785, p. 96, it is stated that might be found, and he was sure furmety or frumity is eaten in many that his wife was jwz*."' places on Mothering Sunday (Mid- Johnson in his Life of Cave says: Lent-Sunday) and on Christmas 1 Cave seemed not at first much Eve.
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