tie was broken by the stern black hand, he had
less than ever to detain him, but he must stay
to shed a few tears over the closing grave. With
his own hands he had built the governor's house,
with his own hands he built the last narrow home,
and himself screwed down the lid and engraved
the good man's name on the silver coffin-plate.

Lagged little knew, as he worked at that
square plate of silver, how soon he, too, would
cross the black sea and go where the sun is not.
He returned from the good man's funeral nervous
.and depressed; took to his bed, and in a few
days he departed—not for England, but for a
more distant world.

Let such stories lead us to temper the severity
of our modern laws, remembering the thousands
of victims whom the timidity and rage of
commercial greed drove in the last century to the
scaffold.

NEW VIEW OF SOCIETY.

In these times, when a man sits down to
write, it is considered necessary that he should
have a purpose in view. To prevent any
misapprehension on this point, so far as I am
personally concerned, I beg to announce at once
that I am provided with a purpose of an exceedingly
serious kind. I want to know whether I
am fit for Bedlam, or not?

This alarming subject of inquiry was started
in my mind, about a week or ten days ago, by
a select circle of kind friends, whose remarks on
the condition of my brains have, since that
period, proved to be not of the most
complimentary nature. The circumstances under which
I have lost caste, intellectually speaking, in the
estimation of those around me, are of a singular
kind. May I beg permission to relate them?

I must begin (if I can be allowed to do so
without giving offence) in my own bedroom;
and I must present myself, with many apologies,
in rather less than a half-dressed condition. To
be plainer still, it was on one of the hottest
days of this remarkably hot summer—the time
was between six and seven o'clock in the evening
—the thermometer had risen to eighty, in
the house—I was sitting on a cane chair, without
coat, waistcoat, cravat or collar, with my
shirt-sleeves rolled up to cool my arms, and my
feet half in and half out of my largest pair of
slippers—I was sitting, a moist and melancholy
man, with my eyes fixed upon my own
Dress Costume reposing on the bed, and my
heart fainting within me at the prospect of going
out to Dinner.

Yes: there it was—the prison of suffocating
black broadcloth in which my hospitable friends
required me to shut myself up—there were the
coat, waistcoat, and trousers, the hideous
habilimentary instruments of torture which Society
actually expected me to put on in the scorching
hot condition of the London atmosphere.
All day long I had been rather less than half
dressed, and had been fainting with the heat.
At that very moment, alone in my spacious
bedroom, with both the windows wide open, and
with nothing but my shirt over my shoulders, I
was in the condition of a man who is gradually
melting away, who is consciously losing all
sense of his own physical solidity.

How should I feel, in half an hour's time,
when I had enclosed myself in the conventional
layers of black broadcloth? How should I feel,
in an hour's time, when I was shut into a
dining-room with fifteen of my melting fellow-
creatures, half of them, at least, slowly liquefying
in garments as black, as heavy, as
outrageously unsuited to the present weather as
my own? How should I feel in three hours'
time, when the evening party, which was to
follow the dinner, began, and when I and a
hundred other polite propagators of animal
heat were all smothering each other within the
space of two drawing-rooms, and under the
encouraging superincumbent auspices of the gas
chandeliers? Society would have been hot in
January, under these after-dinner circumstances
—what would Society be in July?

While these serious questions were suggesting
themselves to me, I took a turn backwards
and forwards in my bedroom; and perspired;
and sat down again in my cane chair. I got
up once more, and approached the neighbourhood
of my dress coat, and weighed it
experimentally in my arms; and perspired; and sat
down again in my cane chair. I got up for the
third time, and tried a little eau-de-Cologne on
my forehead, and attempted to encourage myself
by thinking of the ten thousand other men, in
their bedrooms at that moment, patiently putting
themselves into broadcloth prisons in all parts
of London; and perspired; and sat down again
in my cane chair. Heat, I believe, does not
retard the progress of time. It was getting
nearer and nearer to seven o'clock. I looked,
interrogatively, from my dress trousers to my
legs. On that occasion, only, my legs were
eloquent, and they looked back at me, and
said, No.

I rose, in a violent perspiration, and reviled
myself bitterly, with my forlorn dress trousers
grasped in my hand. Wretch (I said), you are
unworthy of the kind attentions of your friends
—you are a base renegade from your social
duties—you are unnaturally insensible to those
charms of society which your civilised fellow-
creatures universally acknowledge! It was all
in vain. Common Sense—that low-lived quality
which has no veneration for appearances—
Common Sense, which had not only suggested
those terrible questions about what my sensations
would be after I was dressed, but had even
encouraged my own faithful legs to mutiny against
me, now whispered persistently, My friend, if
you make yourself at least ten degrees hotter
than you are already, of your own accord, you
are an Ass—Common Sense drew my trousers
from my grasp, and left them in a dingy heap on
the floor; led my tottering steps (to this day I
don't know how) down stairs to my writing-
table; and there suggested to me one of the
most graceful epistolary compositions, of a brief
kind, in the English language. It was addressed