persons.  Once every year he was visited by his
six sons, his numerous grandchildren, and his
great-grandchildren, who were joined by his
friends and neighbours in getting up a feast-
day, which was always to him "a day of great
rejoicing."

Dr. Barnes " has seldom been in the company
of any one, whether old or young, who enjoyed
better spirits." Mr. Bowman was a happy man.
Old folks, finding their own senses and faculties
impaired and deadened, generally complain of
the disagreeable changes and growing degeneracy
of the times. Bowman did nothing of the
kind; being cheerful, good humoured, and easily
satisfied. The perfect state of his senses and
faculties kept him from finding fault with the
habits or manners, or with the changes of the
successive generations he saw around him. And
this is the universal remark respecting all very
old men. All these five or sixscore men have
been merry men. They pass their century
joking.

               Your merry heart goes all the way,
               Your sad one tires a mile—a.

A good conscience is the soul of a right cheerful
tongue. It is doubtful, from the differences
of testimonies, whether they have all been sober
in eating and drinking, or well regulated in their
social instincts; but the evidence is without a
flaw or an exception, which proves them to
have been men who slept soundly and laughed
heartily.

In taking the important steps of his life,
Bowman evinced the sterling quality of
common sense. In 1745, when but thirty years
of age, he worked in the trenches of
Carlisle, staying, however, only one night with
the soldiers. No Will-o'-the-Wisp enthusiasm
for either king, for Charlie, or for Geordie,
prevented him from doing the thing best for
himself. Contrast this Cumberland farmer with
the Burnses. The grandfather and grand-uncles
of Robert Burns the poet were out in the
'45, risking their lives and ruining their families
for the Stuarts. William Burns was obliged to
go from Kincardineshire to Ayrshire, where the
disloyalty of his family was unknown, to get
employment, but where the man superior to his
station could not succeed in making both ends
meet. The poet Burns, taking Ellisland, a
farm offered by a patron, and recommended
by friends, "judges of land," and with a soil
composed, as he found, "of the riddlings of
creation," and confiding the work on it to
servants—"lasses who did nothing but bake
bread, and lads who sat by the fireside eating it
warm with ale"—the swift end was ruin, misery,
and death. For it was neither the punch-bowl
nor his poetical genius which wrecked Burns.
His ruin was caused by a deficiency of selfishness,
by an amiability which yields the sway to
flattering friends and fawning servants, and
allows generosity to usurp the place of justice.
The poems of Burns brought him a thousand
pounds, and they obtained for his sons commissions
in the civil and military service: it was,
therefore, the unselfish and unsolid action of his
mind in reference to his business as a farmer,
which by worry, by despondency, by despair,
and by disease, shortened his life. Robert
Burns was probably born with as good a
constitution as Robert Bowman, and it is important
to note the reasons why the one life was at least
a period of one hundred and seventeen years,
and the other only a span of thirty-seven.

No veil need be drawn over the closing scene
of the life of this notable man. Not from in
disposition, but for comfort, he took to his bed
several years before his death, during the cold
of a severe winter; and he kept it because he was
better there than anywhere else. He resided
with one of his sons upon his own estate, the
fruit of his industry. Three months before his
death, without any cause, he began to fancy that
his family were less attentive to him than
formerly. His bodily health continuing good
until the last day or two, his mental faculties
declined gradually, and then rather suddenly;
without pain and without suffering, the powers
of life gave way, and he died on the evening of
Friday, June 18, 1823. He died one hundred
and seventeen years and eight months after his
baptism; an event which he remembered, and
he was therefore, most probably, at least in his
one hundred and twentieth year.

An oak, said to be six hundred years old, the
oldest tree in Cumberland, and the last of
Inglewood Forest, fell by a strange coincidence
upon the day on which Mr. Robert Bowman
died; the oldest tree and the oldest man fell
together.

IRON PIGS AT A PIC-NIC.

NOT all who know Coblentz are also
acquainted with the lovely country in its immediate
neighbourhood. Occasionally a tourist goes out
of the regular route " up the Rhine," and makes
a détour along the banks of its tributary, the
Lahn, to Ems; but they are few who venture
to turn aside so far, and Ems is held in the
season principally by the Russian, German, and
Polish gamblers, who are permitted by the
Nassau government to carry on their game here
unmolested. Any one who has been fortunate
enough thus to deviate from his course, will
remember the magnificent scenery through which
the road to Ems—either rail or turnpike—passes,
skirting the rapid little Lahn as it turns and
twists through the deep mountain defile. The
banks of the river are inhabited by a population
of miners, not large in number, but here and
there clustering into villages, composed of very
small tumble-down looking houses, among which
ihe conical chimneys of smelting furnaces are to
be seen. Large heaps of ore are frequently
visible on the river-side, of a dark red colour,
while the miners themselves, stained by contact
with the ochreous soil, have more the appearance
of Red Indians than of civilised Teutons.

It was near one of these mining stations,
in a beautiful wood full of moss-grown rocks,
ferns, creepers, and here and there a clear