At all events, I trust that I have shown that
whist has its ethical phase: that no man
playing it can, no matter what his proficiency
or his ignorance, no matter how eager or
indifferent he may be, no matter how subtle to
subdue emotion, or how guarded to cloak his
wishes, no man, I repeat, can shroud his real
nature in obscurity, but must stand out revealed,
and declared in his true character. The test is
one that no subterfuge can escape from, no
ingenuity evade.

'Le style c'est l'homme," was the old maxim
of a once famed philosopher, but a wiser age
repudiates the adage, and proclaims that it is
"whist is the man." With this declaration I
have done. "Exegi monumentum;" to others
I bequeath all the benefit of my researches, all
the profit of my labours. The rubber is over.
Good night!

         THE BREATH OF LIFE.

OF the family of Monsieur Turgot, the
finance minister of Louis XVI., no member
had lived beyond the age of fifty. Turgot
himself was, while he lived, a vigorous and
healthy man, but he died at the age of
fifty-three. On the other hand, we rarely meet with
an octogenarian who has not long-lived people
in his family, and almost every man can find
within the circle of his own private acquaintance
some family in which long life appears to have
been hereditary. Why does the gnat live for a
day, the raven for a century? Is it a difference
of flesh only that gives to the horse more years
of life than to the dog? Why does one seed
produce a plant that has but a year's life, and
another grow into a tree, which is said to
have lived four thousand years? The breath
of life is an unpenetrated mystery, still to
be referred humbly to the simple exercise
of the Creator's will. We cannot, by any
search, lay bare the source of life in the fresh
seed; we cannot tell how life was breathed into
the infant, or account for the decay by which a
season of maturity is followed. There is nothing
in the substance of any creature out of which
the assigned limit of its life could be found.
Apart from the higher soul of man, there is a
breath of life exerting its force on the machinery
presented by the structure of each living thing.
A nursing mother, suddenly depressed by a shock
of profound terror, put her infant to her breast.
At the first draught of her milk its limbs
became rigid and it died. The structure of the
child was what it had been, but the principle of
life was gone. Daily experience and practice
recognise the existence of this vital force. We
speak of husbanding our strength, of power
reduced by sickness or privation, recognise in
some neighbours a vigour of life that enables
them to get safely through fatigues and risks
that would kill weaker men. We know the
value of this force in helping men to get over
all bodily ailments, yet, when sickness comes, the
popular superstition still is to betake ourselves
to gruel and purgation, and all ways of lowering
the principle of life within us that is best able
to fight our battle.

Popular superstition consists almost wholly
in the longer retention by the untaught million
of errors, during many generations maintained
and diffused, abandoned by the educated few.
Not fifty years ago, Doctor John Armstrong
strongly urged free bleeding in typhus fever.
To this day there are many who, if they do
not bleed men sinking under typhus, have
recourse to purging, or the use of antimony and
depressing drugs. But the wholesome rule of
the profession now, is, to use wine, quinine, and
whatever can support the patient's strength.
Marsh fevers were made fatal by bleeding, in
the days of the Walcheren expedition, and this
practice was supported by high authority, even
so late as thirty years ago. When bleeding
was abandoned, mercury was used; six
thousand grains of mercury were given in one case
by Doctor Chisholm. The mortality was very
great under this system of depression. Large
doses of quinine are now used, and four in every
five of the lives that would have been
sacrificed under the old method are saved. It is
found that pulmonary disease is the chief cause
of mortality under the age of fifty; but above
the age of fifty, apoplexy. Impending strokes
of that chief associate of the period of declining
vital force, used of old to be converted into
fatal attacks by indiscriminate use of the lancet,
the cupping-glass, the calomel purge, and low
diet. Now, these are seldom used, and
particular care is paid to the sustaining of the
powers of life. Violent mania used to be
regarded as a display of energy to be abated by
free bleeding, depression with tartar emetic, and
low diet. " Now," says the medical proprietor
of a lunatic asylum, who has fifty years'
experience, "we treat our maniacal cases with
abundance of food, six or seven meals a day of
mutton-chops, beefstakes, porter, wine, &c., and
it generally sends them to sleep in thirty-six
hours or two days. They can't stand out against
the food; it regularly knocks them down; it
calms them completely, and we rarely now lose
a case."

The whole march of medical experience and
practice during our own generation has been
steadily in this direction. Once upon a time
surgeons did not believe that wounds were to be
healed properly without vulneraries, balsams,
and charpies. That it was good simply to bring
the edges of a wound together, sustain general
health to the utmost, and leave the result to
"the healing power of nature," was a simple
truth, now universally accepted as a principle in
surgery, but then unknown. The tendency of
modern practice is to the recognition of a like
principle among physicians. The professional
patriarch who began practice with the belief
that he had twenty remedies for every disease,
now owns that he has twenty diseases with no
remedy; but, at the same time, his strong
reliance on the marvellous construction of the
living frame increases year by year as he sees
terrible diseases conquered by an effort of nature,