average of suicides, so admirably preserved by the Registrar-General
and other painstaking persons, is not entirely to be depended upon.
You should hear the doctors at my Inn (in the intervals of their
abuse of their professional brethren) discourse upon this topic--on
that overdose of chloral which poor B. took, and on that injudicious
self-application of chloroform which carried off poor C. With the
law in such a barbarous state in relation to self-destruction, and
taking into account the feelings of relatives, there was, of course,
only one way of wording the certificate, but--and then they shake
their heads as only doctors can, and help themselves to port, though
they know it is poison to them.

It is an old joke that annuitants live for ever, but no annuity
ever had the effect of prolonging life which the present assurance
companies have. How many a time, I wonder, in these later years,
has a hand been stayed, with a pistol or 'a cup of cold poison' in
it, by the thought, 'If I do this, my family will lose the money I
am insured for, besides the premiums.' This feeling is altogether
different from that which causes Jeannette and Jeannot in their
Paris attic to light their charcoal fire, stop up the chinks with
their love-letters, and die (very disreputably) 'clasped in one
another's arms, and silent in a last embrace.' There is not one
halfpenny's worth of sentiment about it in the Englishman's case,
nor are any such thoughts bred in his brain while youth is in him.
It is in our midway days, with old age touching us here and there,
as autumn 'lays its fiery finger on the leaves' and withers them,
that we first think of it. When the weight of anxiety and care is
growing on us, while the shoulders are becoming bowed (not in
resignation, but in weakness) which have to bear it; when our pains
are more and more constant, our pleasures few and fading, and when