ime in the balcony of the house where he was shut
up with the plague-spotted body which he was to die in dissecting, he
had faith that he should step out of a waxing and waning sunlight into a
region which "had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in
it, the glory of God being the light of it." The sick Moslem who,
falling behind his troop, and fearing to lie unburied, scoops his grave
and lies down in it, wrapped in his grave-clothes, and covers himself
up, except the face, leaving it to the winds to heap sand upon it,
trembles the while at the thought of the two examining angels, who are
this night to prove and perhaps torture him. The English lady who took
laudanum on learning that she had a fatal disease, from fear of becoming
loathsome to a husband for whom she had lived, had before her the
prominent idea of reunion with him; so that life in one world presented
as much of hope as in the other of despair.--Nations share in
differences like these, according to the prevalent religious sentiment;
and from this species of act may the sentiment be more or less correctly
inferred.

Suicide is very common among a race of Africans who prefer it to
slavery. They believe in a life of tropical ease and freedom after
death, and rush into it so eagerly on being reduced to slavery, that
the planters of Cuba refuse them in the market, knowing that after a few
hours, or days, in spite of all precautions, nothing but their dead
bodies will remain in the hands of their masters. The French have, of
late years, abounded in suicides, while there are few or none in
Ireland. The most vain and the most sympathetic part of the French
multitude were found to be the classes which yielded the victims. If a
young lady and her lover shot one another with pistols tied with pink
ribbons, two or three suicides amidst blue and green ribbons were sure
to follow the announcement of the first in the newspaper, till a
sensible physician suggested that suicides should not be noticed in
newspapers, or should be treated with ridicule: the advice was acted
upon, and proved by the result to be sound. This profusion of
self-murders could not have taken place amidst a serious belief of an
immediate entrance upon purgatory, such as is held by the majority of
the Irish. Only in a state of vague speculation as to another life could
the future have operated as so slight a check upon the rash impulses of
the present. The Irish, an impetuous race, like