been obvious from the earliest time that it
could be manifested; and when the eldest
sister took the mother's place, the child
appeared to find no difference. From the
mode of feeling of the family, the mother was
never spoken of; and if she had been, such
mention would have been nothing to the
idiot son, who comprehended no conversation.
He spent his life in scribbling on the slate,
and hopping round the play-ground of the
school kept by his brother-in-law, singing
after his own fashion. He had one special
piece of business besides, and one prodigious
pleasure. The business was—going daily,
after breakfast, to speak to the birds in
the wood behind the house: and the
supreme pleasure was turning the mangle.
Most of us would have reversed the
business and pleasure. When his last
illness—consumption—came upon him at the
age of thirty, the sister had been long dead;
and there were none of his own family, we
believe, living; certainly none had for many
years had any intercourse with him. For
some days before his death, when he ought
to have been in bed, nothing but a too
distressing force could keep him from going to
the birds. On the last day, when his weakness
was extreme, he tried to rise,—managed
to sit up in bed, and said he must go,—the
birds would wonder so! The brother-in-law
offered to go and explain to the birds; and
this must perforce do. The dying man lay,
with his eyes closed, and breathing his life
away in slower and slower gasps, when he
suddenly turned his head, looked bright and
sensible, and exclaimed in a tone never heard
from him before, " Oh! my mother! how
beautiful! " and sank round again—dead.

There are not a few instances of that action
of the brain at the moment before death by
which long-buried impressions rise again like
ghosts or visions; but we have known none
so striking as this, from the lapse of time,
the peculiarity of the case, and the
unquestionable blank between.

There are flashes of faculty now and then
in the midst of the   twilight of idiot existence
—without waiting for the moment of death.
One such, to the last degree impressive, is
recorded by the late Sir Thomas Dick Lauder.
in his account of the great Morayshire floods,
about a quarter of a century since. An
innkeeper, who, after a merry evening of dancing,
turned out to help his neighbours in the rising
of the Spey, carelessly got upon some planks
which were floated apart, and was carried
down the stream on one. He was driven
against a tree, which he climbed, and his wife
and neighbours saw him lodged in it before
dark. As the floods rose, there began to be
fears for the tree: and the shrill whistle
which came from it, showed that the man
felt himself in danger, and wanted help.
Everybody concluded help to be out of the
question, as no boats could get near; and
they could only preach patience until morning,
to the poor wife, or until the flood should go
down. Hour after hour, the whistle grew
wilder and shriller; and at last it was almost
continuous. It suddenly ceased; and those
who could hardly bear it before, longed to
hear it again. Dawn showed that the tree
was down. The body of the innkeeper
was found far away—with the watch in his
fob stopped at the hour that the tree must
have fallen. The event being talked over in
the presence of the village idiot, he laughed.
Being noticed, he said he would have saved
the man. Being humoured, he showed how
a tub, fastened to a long rope would have
been floated, as the plank with the man on it
was floated, to the tree. If this poor creature
had but spoken in time, his apparent
inspiration would have gone some way to
confirm the Scotch superstition, which holds
—with that of the universal ancient world
of theology—that " Innocents are favourites
of Heaven."

It is for us to act upon the medium view
sanctioned alike by science and morals—
neither to cast out our idiots, like the savages
who leave their helpless ones to perish; nor
to worship them, as the pious Egyptians did,
and other nations who believed that the gods
dwelt in them, more or less, and made oracles
of them;—a perfectly natural belief in the case
of beings who manifest a very few faculties in
extraordinary perfection, in the apparent
absence of all others. Our business is, in the first
place, to reduce the number of idiots to the
utmost of our power, by attending to the
conditions of sound life and health; and
especially by discountenancing, as a crime, the
marriage of blood-relations; and, in the next
place, by trying to make the most and the
best of such faculties as these imperfect
beings possess. It is not enough to repeat
the celebrated epitaph on an idiot, and to
hope that his privations here will be made
up to him hereafter. We must lessen those
privations to the utmost, by the careful
application of science in understanding his
case; and of skill, and inexhaustible patience
and love, in treating it. Happily, there are
now institutions, by aiding which any of us
may do something towards raising the lowest,
and blessing the most afflicted, members of
our race.

GRADATION.

TELL me not of insulations, of affinities distinct,
For all things with one another are indissolubly link'd:
Nature's work is in gradations, from the life-blood to the stone;
Oh, the infinite commingling! Nothing, nothing stands alone.
Know ye when the gates of morning close against the twilight gray,
And the setting sun's wet purple flushes out the glare of day?