and we took our way back to the town.
George informed us, as we went, that he had been for several nights haunted
by the image of his mother; and could only thus account for the conviction
that had seized him, that the body of the female he had seen in the
dissecting-room was that of his parent. It is a remarkable fact, and the
one which chiefly induced me to give this narrative, that the scene I have
now described wrought so powerfully on the feelings of Mr B----, that the
form of his grief was entirely changed. During the whole of the subsequent
night, he wept intensely--nature was relieved--his sorrow was mollified
into one of those

"Moods that speak their softened woes;"

and time soon wrought its accustomed amelioration. I never saw one who
seemed more certainly doomed to the fate of the heart-stricken; and,
however fanciful it may seem, I attribute to the mistake of his son the
restoration of the father.

THE CONDEMNED.

I believe it was Fontenelle who said that, if he were to have been
permitted to pass his life over again, he would have done everything he did
in the world, and, of course, consented to suffer what he had suffered, in
consideration of what he had enjoyed. I have heard the same statement from
others. A very learned and ingenious professor in the north, whose
lucubrations have often cast the effulgence of his rare genius over the
pages of the Border Tales, has no hesitation in declaring that he would
gladly consent to receive another tack of existence in this strange world,
with all its pains and penalties, were it for nothing but to be allowed to
witness the curious scenes, the startling occurrences, the humorous
bizarrerie of cross-purposes, the conceits, the foibles, the triumphs of
the creature man. Moore the poet has somewhere said, that he would not
consent to live his life over again, except upon the condition that he were
to be gifted with less love and more judgment--probably forgetting that in
that case he would not have been the author of "Lallah Rookh;" though,
mayhap, of a still drier life of Sheridan than that which came from his
pen. I have often put the question to patients, and have found the answer
to be regulated by the state of their disease. Upon the whole, it requires
a very sharp, bitter pang, indeed, to extort the confession, that they
would not accept another lease of life. If men were not Christians, they
would choose, I think, to be Pythagoreans, were it for noth