Briefly before the end his symptoms abated. Sally and some of the others allowed themselves optimism. But then the abscess that had been growing in his lung burst, and in his weakened condition he could not expel the fluid. He slipped into unconsciousness, and at eleven o’clock on the night of April 17, 1790, three months after his eighty-fourth birthday, with his grandsons Temple and Benny at his bed, he quietly died.
