Discovery

One page 192, Shade actually predicts his unfinished poem! In his posthumously published poem, "The Nature of Electricity" Shade writes about the nine-hundred-ninety-ninth lamp post and an old friend. The poem Pale Fire is 999 lines long and the last four are:

"And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly--
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess--goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane."

The hi-lighted words create the setting for John Shades death! Shade walks through the encroaching dusk. He sees a butterfly (but true to dead Aunt Maud's warning [p. 188], does not heed it). The gardener is present (although we don't know his name. We do, however, know that Kinbote had a crush on him [p. 290-292]). The gardener does not, in fact, have a wheelbarrow, but instead a trowel with which he disarms Gradus. However, it may be important to note that one of the definitions of barrow is also a grave or burial site.