would recur to the very fount and origin of all human knowledge.
Seizing his pen, he wrote thus:--


A. B. C. D. E. F. G.!

Whoever shall piece together these valuable lines, thus fragmentarily
presented, will enter into the feelings of the Town Council, which
bestowed a vote of thanks upon their authors, and caused the stanza
to be engraven on the worthy provost's monument. I have not myself
read it, but am assured it is in existence.

There was something of poor Thomas Hood's morbi taste for the
ghastly, and the physically repulsive, in his fancy of spending
some time during his last illness in drawing a picture of himself
dead in his shroud. In his memoirs, published by his children,
you may see the picture, grimly truthful: and bearing the legend,
He sang the Song of the Shirt. You may discover in what he drew,
as well as in what he wrote, many indications of the humourist's
perverted taste: and no doubt the knowledge that mortal disease
was for years doing its work within, led his thoughts oftentimes
to what was awaiting himself. He could not walk in an avenue
of elm-trees, without fancying that one of them might furnish
his coffin. When in his ear, as in Longfellow's, 'the green trees
whispered low and mild,' their sound did not carry him back to
boyhood, but onward to his grave. He listened, and there rose within

A secret, vague, prophetic fear,
As though by certain mark,
I knew the fore-ordained tree,