nt apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter. Addison
gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,--or somebody makes
the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green
fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would
think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing
they could,--to make their rhetorical point,--and then bow themselves
politely out of the world.

Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their evidence
in favor of this or that favorite belief. The camp-followers of
proselyting sects have come in at the close of every life where they
could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its thoughts, and carry
them off as spoils. The Roman Catholic or other priest who insists on
the reception of his formula means kindly, we trust, and very commonly
succeeds in getting the acquiescence of the subject of his spiritual
surgery, but do not let us take the testimony of people who are in the
worst condition to form opinions as evidence of the truth or falsehood
of that which they accept. A lame man's opinion of dancing is not good
for much. A poor fellow who can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless
and full of pains, whose flesh has wasted from him, whose blood is like
water, who is gasping for breath, is not in a condition to judge fairly
of human life, which in all its main adjustments is intended for men in
a normal, healthy condition. It is a remark I have heard from the wise
Patriarch of the Medical Profession among us, that the moral condition
of patients with disease above the great breathing-muscle, the
diaphragm, is much more hopeful than that of patients with disease below
it, in the digestive organs. Many an honest ignorant man has given
us pathology when he thought he was giving us psychology. With
this preliminary caution I shall proceed to the story of the Little
Gentleman's leaving us.

When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not likely
to remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender conscience
and kindly nature, was not a little exercised on his behalf. It was
undeniable that on several occasions the Little Gentleman had expressed
himself with a good deal of freedom on a class of subjects which,
according to the divinity-student, he had no right to form an opinion
upon. He therefore considered his future welfare in jeopardy.

The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with p