in a good humor, and they passed the rest of the evening very
pleasantly.

One of the few fragments in Otis' handwriting now extant, is a
memorandum made during the two years of transient sanity just
preceding his tragic death. Returning one Sunday from public
worship, he wrote: "I have this day attended divine service, and
heard a sensible discourse; and thanks be to God, I now enjoy the
greatest of all blessings, mens sana in copore sano" (a sound
mind in a sound body). But this gleam of reason was as transient
as others that had preceded, and with Bowen we willingly draw a
veil over the sad record of this most terrible misfortune of our
hero. "To be among men, and yet not of them; to preserve the
outward form and lineaments of a human being, while the spirit
within is wanting, or is transformed into a wreck of what it has
been; is surely one of the most impressive and affecting
instances of the ills to which mortality is exposed. It enforces
with melancholy earnestness the moral lesson, that the only
objects of the affections are the character and the intellect;
and when these are destroyed, we look upon the external shape and
features only as on the tomb in which the mortal remains of a
friend repose. We even long for the closing of the scene, and
think it would be far better if the now tenantless and ruined
house were levelled with the ground."

A nice sense of honor was perhaps the second most striking point
in Otis's energetic and strongly-marked character. Called by
reason of his fame as an advocate to the management of suits even
at a distance from home, and receiving the largest fees ever
given to an advocate in the province, he yet disdained to suffer