eleven days

"It was an awful eleven days; and yet, with a lifetime stretching back between to-day and
then, they are still a grateful memory to me, and beautiful. In effect they were days of
companionship with one's sacred dead, and I have known no comradeship that was so close
or so precious. We clung to the hours and the minutes, counting them as they wasted away,
and parting with them with that pain and bereavement which a miser feels who sees his
hoard filched from him coin by coin by robbers and is helpless to prevent it."