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the rest, and the end is often sudden. inan may, like Dr. Willis, at 90, the attendant to George III., go to sleep in his chair and never wake. Or a slight cold, or indigestion, or over-fatigue, even a fit of laughing, or choking, or coughing, may bring about death in a manner much to be envied by those who have to travel by longer and more painful roads to the same end. A cattle-dealer at 98 attended the market on Saturday. Here he laughed Here he laughed and talked too much, and the excitement caused his death on the Tuesday. At 94 a lady walked a quarter of a mile to church, there caught a cold, and died that night.

The signs of suffering are painful only to the bystanders. It is rare to find a clear intellect at death. Nevertheless, that instinct is true that treasures up last words and dying sayings for in the darkened mind only the strongest and most vivid ideas and expressions are left to find utterance, and hence often throw an unexpected light upon the real character. Hence the saying, "the ruling passion strong in

death."

CLERGYMEN AND MINISTERS.

Among occupations, the ranks of the clergy stand pre-eminent for longevity. Next in order come Dissenting ministers. The causes of this are obvious and interesting. In the first place, a clergyman is such, as a rule, by a process of natural selection. It is not unlikely he comes of a pious family, and one therefore shielded from many excesses. In the second, it is generally the more placid average disposi tions that enter the ministry, the more active and fiery characters drifting off into

the army, or politics, or some more active occupation. Next, the influence of quiet literary work is most beneficial, while the mere hygienic value of the real possession of true religion, "a mind at peace with God," is very high. The possession of an assured though moderate income is also helpful, as is the regular and arduousthough not, as a rule, too exhausting— round of daily work. All these causes result in longevity. The same obtains, though to a less degree, among Dissenting ministers. In these, selection from a good and long-lived stock is not so common. The surroundings in many ways are not so academical, and even the income is frequently not so assured. Nevertheless, they only come slightly behind their brethren, and far outreach all other professions. Those, however, whose lot in life's brief struggle is cast in a more active sphere, and amid more anxious cares, need not regret the comparative shortness of their years, so that they are spent to the best, and to the glory of God; for, as Bailey so nobly says—

"Life's more than health and the quick round of blood,

'Tis a great spirit, and a loving heart.

REQUISITES FOR OLD AGE.

An easy conscience, a merry heart, and a contented mind are three requisites for old age, and they are the assured possessions and birthright of true Christians. The conscience, calm in the Divine assurance of sin forgiven; the heart rejoicing in His love and in the luxury of shedding the sunshine, or rather the reflection of that unselfish love, on all around; and the mind not only contented, but over filled with the contemplation of the glories "behind the veil, 99 so soon and softly to he lifted. It may be contended that such a picture does not describe the average aged Christian. Possibly not; but is there anything incongruous or exaggerated in it? No! the incongruity is in ourselves, who live so far below the privileges, the joys, and the peace that are the rightful possessions of all who know the mean

ing of real personal religion. Listen to that master singer whose voice was not long since hushed on earth:

"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be

The last of life, from which the first was made:

Our times are in His hand

Who saith, A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God; see all, nor be afraid.'"

It is pleasing to note that among the 800 to whom we have so frequently referred, selected from all classes of society, one of the most interesting and cheering facts observed is not only how frequently persons attain to the age of 100, but that those who do so are commonly cheerful and happy, without malady, enjoying the evening shade of life and the tranquillity that accompanies it; and that they, in most instances, pass away in perfect calm, without a struggle, realizing in a remarkable way the words of Dr. Elliotson :

Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when gray hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave!

But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,

Shall lead thee to thy grave." Unfortunately this idyllic close is not always realized. The old man is sometimes querulous, cross, selfish, repining, hard to please, and hard to live with. "Peu de gens, "said a famous Frenchman, "savent être vieux. Let us then, in closing, note a little more closely some few of the characteristics of a typical old age, and then consider how best they are to be attained.

A SECOND CHILDHOOD.

Old age should in many respects be truly a second childhood. The phrase is often used opprobriously to express the garrulity and foolishness that often mark both our exits and our entrances on life's stage. But childhood has another side, that may be beautifully reproduced. Its trustfulness, its freedom from care or wor ry, its confiding love, its serene brow, its ready smile, are all lovely in old age; combined as they then are with the wisdom of a lifetime. The exhortation of our Lord to His disciples, "Be ye wise as serpents, harmless as doves," seems perhaps most easy to obey in old age. The experience amassed may be helpfully and earnestly used in wise and loving counsel,

and the veteran thus become the trusted guide of the house. The intellect is often bright and clear, as we have seen, in very advanced life. In fact, as the emotional nature decreases, the intellectual often increases, and judgment and the calm light of reason take largely the place of impulse and the dictates of the affections.

In a minority the reverse obtains, and the old man seems too largely emotional easily moved to smiles or tears, and too little intelligent. An old age cannot be considered typical where love and reason are not alike conspicuous.

SELFISHNESS IN OLD AGE.

The special and inherent danger of old age is selfishness, and it is this that most frequently disfigures it.

The old man

naturally gets more and more abstracted from surrounding objects and interests, and absorbed in himself, and thus, as he becomes more isolated, he becomes increasingly selfish. He thinks he has done his share for others: it is now their turn to think of him. This may be true, but is not the way to live in sunshine. Continue, dear aged friend, to think of and care for others in their little daily wants as well as in their greater interests. will be all the more appreciated in you because it is rare, and the love you will create in return will make you very happy. You will not need repayment, though you will get it, for the pleasure of unselfish love is its own reward.

It

Try and keep up your interest in the life around you, and resist as long as you are able the rôle of a solitary unit. There is no more important point than this in prolonging life-the maintenance of an active connection with our environment. Old age has a natural affinity for youth, and young life around is a safe tonic. Many an old man has thus had an Indian summer added to his days by the presence and love of the young. If only to attract these, therefore, it is worth while being lovable; and to be loved, one must love. Old people often lament that they have ceased to be useful; but in this they may be mistaken. No one knows the measure of his influence, or what lessons may be conveyed by the cheerful acceptance of his lot.

After all, there is nothing but Christianity that suits all ages, from the child at his mother's knee to the patriarch on

his dying bed. A typical old age must be truly Christian, not alone in faith and doctrine, but in love and good works; and at no time through life does the heavenly light so illumine the thin walls of the earthly tabernacle as just before it is taken down and folded in the grave. But this serenity, this sunshine, can by no means be acquired in a moment. The foundations of a happy old age should be laid in early life.

The words that Tennyson in his "Enone" puts into the mouth of the goddess of wisdom may well be pondered by those who would enjoy a peaceful old age: "Self reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for) but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;

WE believe the Barttelot story-though we hold the Major irresponsible-and we do not believe the Jameson story; and as the evidence is pretty much the same in both cases, we will take some pains to explain in what we conceive the difference to consist. There is very little in the charge against Major Barttelot which is in se incredible, even if he were sane, a point upon which we shall have a word to say by and by. Though a gentleman by birth and education, and an officer by training, Major Barttelot is admitted to have been a man of tyrannical temper and harsh views of duty, and he was placed by circumstances in command, not of a sort of Sepoy regiment which is the idea of the average London reader-but of a camp which is best likened to a ship, merchant ship, pirate ship, or privateer, which you will, manned by unruly Soudanese and halfsavage Negroes, whom he held in detestation, and at the same time in supreme contempt. The heat at Yambuya was awful, the air sickening, the food indigestible or insufficient, the chances of mutiny constant, and the work a weary waiting for months in a mid-African swamp for news which in his belief would never arrive. That under such circumstances a man of Major Barttelot's temperament should degenerate into a tyrant dangerous to every one who approached him, savage in all

The

his sentences, suspecting everybody of latent hostility, and intent on cowing the hostile into obedience by sheer terror, is neither unnatural nor infrequent. same thing has been recorded over and over again of captains even of men-of-war, and is being recorded of merchant captains in every port of the world in every year of our present lives. We venture to say that no month passes in which charges nearly or quite as bad as those alleged against Major Barttelot are not made by sailors against some captain of a cheap or overworked ship; and in a definite proportion of such cases, the charges are either proved to be true, or, as happens in some Asiatic ports, are known by juries to be true, though they acquit in the general interest of marine discipline." The worst captains do not flog to death, because they can seldom get quartermasters to assist them in such dangerous freaks of will; but they cause death by blows, by needless resort to the revolver, and, in the case of ship's boys, by long-continued persecution. Even the perpetual prodding with a steel-pointed stick attributed to Major Barttelot, is no worse than the perpetual rope's-ending constantly proved in marine trials, and is, curiously enough, attributed to himself by a humane African explorer, the German doctor Werne, who accompanied an Egyp tian expedition up the Nile despatched to

reduce some Negro tribes to order. He was nicknamed the "Father of the Iron Stick," though he used it on the oppressors, not the oppressed. We hate to believe it, but we see nothing incredible in the charges of tyranny, more especially if we strip them of their accidental but unfair coloring. A boy may have died of a kick without the kicker intending murder, and it is quite possible, we should say most probable, that the horrible floggings were made more horrible by the evil zeal the Soudanese put into their strokes, and by the nature of the flogging instruments employed, which were, we imagine, of hide, not whip-cord, and cut far deeper into the flesh. Major Barttelot did not intend to kill, for he remitted half his worst sentence when he heard of its effect. Major Barttelot was, we believe, at Yambuya what he is described by Mr. Stanley, Mr. Troup, and Mr. Bonny to have been, that is, a tyrant; but he was also something else, which relieves him of moral responsibility for that odious offence. If the stories about him are true at all, we do not doubt, and no jury in England would, we believe, doubt, that he was, during the greater part of his life at Yambuya, insane, -insane, we mean, in the ordinary medical sense. Just read the evidence. Unless Mr. Bonny, whose motives are unimpeached, is lying out of pure malignity and for no conceivable end, Major Barttelot showed the most ordinary signs of madness, suspected his chief, Mr. Stanley, of intending to poison him, stated to Mr. Bonny that he intended to poison a great Arab-Mr. Bonny, be it observed, humoring his delusion-suspected insolence in everybody, ranabout grimacing horribly at his own men, and actually took to biting negresses in sheer cruelty, an act, we venture to say, simply impossible to a sane European. We hold it impossible to believe the narratives at all- and remember, if they are baseless concoctions, at least one living man is responsible-without believing also that Major Barttelot, naturally a stern or even harsh man who detested Negroes, had lost his head under the miseries of his situation and the burning climate, and that moral blame, if it at taches anywhere, attaches to Mr. Bonny, who, as he acknowledges, suspected, or rather, we should say, knew the truth, and did not at once place him under physical restraint. He had the force to do it, NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIII., No. 1.

for every man in camp hated Major Barttelot, and his excuse, though, we doubt not, conscientiously and truthfully offered, is totally inadequate as an argument against arrest on the ground of insanity. He says his act would have been mutiny, and would have cost Major Barttelot his life, he being so hated that, once seized, he would have been torn to pieces. That is probably true; but nobody asked Mr. Bonny to rise on his superior officer. His duty was to restrain his patient,-in sleep, if necessary, and his patient, once proclaimed mad, would have been protected by every Mahommedan in camp. Nothing will induce a Mussulman to hurt a madman, he being in the immediate grip of Allah, not even if he is regarded as madman, infidel, and blasphemer all in one, as the devoted and eccentric missionary Wolff was, when he proclaimed the truth of the Christian Gospel at the very gate of Mecca. England would then have been spared a needless and abhorrent scandal, and Major Barttelot's life would probably have been saved.

We turn to an infinitely worse story, originally related by Mr. Stanley in the words of a witness whom he does not name, but who was the interpreter, Assad Farran, a Levantine :-" Mr. Jameson, returning from Kason, got into a conversation with Tippoo Tib and another Arab about cannibalism. He informed them that he did not believe there was such a thing as cannibalism, because, although he had heard much, he had never seen it, and no white man had ever seen it done.. Tippoo Tib replied that it would be easy to prove it if he liked. Jameson asked: how that was possible, and it was answered,. If you will pay for a slave, and give it. to those men there, they will show you." Twelve cotton handkerchiefs were then given in exchange for a little girl, aged ten or twelve years. She was given to the cannibals, and Jameson is said to have then exclaimed: Now let us see what you can do.' The girl was tied up, and Jameson took his sketch-book in his hand. The witness to this stood a few feet behind him. When all was ready a knife was plunged into the girl's heart, and Jameson stood still sketching while her lifeblood spurted over her body. He made six sketches during the different stages of the affair from the murder to the eating of the body." Mr. Bonny, who is not even

8

snspected of malignity toward Mr. Jame son, declares that this story is true, except that only six pieces of handkerchief were paid, and that its hero himself related it to him in so many words. Moreover, he states, and it appears to be beyond question, that the sketches were made, and exist. That narrative, if true-Assad Farran, minute as his narrative is, recanted his testimony-surpasses in the ghastly criminality it imputes to Mr. Jameson, anything in the modern, perhaps even the ancient, history of crime. Parrhasius, who in the legend crucified a slave in order to paint his dying agonies, would have shrunk from the taint of cannibalism; and the Sultan who ordered a death in order to prove an anatomical theory, probably selected a criminal, and certainly believed that the Mussulman who died submissively under the direct and personal order of the Khalif passed at once to bliss. There is no need of condemnation, however, for we do not believe that any such crime as that alleged ever occurred. That Mr. Jameson, a naturalist full of morbid curiosity, may have wished to be certain that the Mamyuema were cannibals, may have desired to prove the fact to Europe by his sketches, and may have overcome the African reluctance to let any European sec such a horrible mystery-a reluctance to which Mr. St. John testifies in his chapters on Vaudooism in Hayti-by a bribe of cloth, is possible enough; as it is also possible that, finding the use to which his bribe had been turned, he, in a passion of self condemnation, accused himself to Mr. Bonny as author of the little girl's death: but the deliberate purchase of the child for the purpose of murdering her in order to sketch the consequent feast on her remains!-we should not have believed that accusation if we had heard Mr. Jameson, a man believed by all his friends to be gentle, relate it of himself. We do not, in fact, care one straw about the evidence. No evidence is sufficient to prove such a charge against any educated European whatsoever. It is nonsense to say moral evidence is of no value against testimony; we all know instinctively that it has every value. There are plenty of men in the world-take the late Lord Iddesleigh, for example of whom, if they were accused

of stealing, and convicted on their own confession, no human being would believe the charge. Their friends might inquire into the evidence if the accusation were murder, for the temptation to murder is a mystery to us all; but for the charge of stealing they would have only an immovable disbelief. So have we for the charge of suborning cannibalism when brought against any European who does not himself intend, in the delirium of hunger, to eat the victim. We know absolutely nothing of Mr. Jameson, his character, his history, or his ways of expressing himself; but that he did not do this thing we do know. That he was guilty of evil callousness in pursuing an investigation which may have been philanthropic, but was certainly inexcusable, lies on the face of the story, if it is true at all; but the original criminal act, the murder of the child, we utterly disbelieve. It is not true, for exactly the same reason that it is not true that Lord Beaconsfield worshipped the (Greek) gods of the Ansayrii, whom he so eulogistically described. It is not true, because moral impossibilities exist, and the crime alleged in this story is one of them, and one of the least believable we ever remember to have seen. We shall be told next that an Englishman himself killed and ate an English comrade, to see if his body was really as salt and as nicotized as the Feejeeans used to say. and the one thing that we cannot forgive Mr. Stanley is, that he should have raised the discussion. It was entirely needless, and can, whether false or only exaggerated, have no possible effect except to raise in the public mind a feeling that Africa is a sort of tropical hell where any crime is possible, and that as the Arctic Regions seem to freeze wickedness out of their explorers, so Africa seems to heat every evil passion into a blazing fire. It would have been far better to submit in silence to any imputations, just as Kings do, and trust to the common sense of mankind, or, if that was too hard for an ambitious man, to submit all the evidence in secret to men of such unquestioned character and station that their verdict would instantly have been accepted by the community.Spectator.

It is nonsense;