Most thoughtful men must feel it a curious and interesting study, to trace the history of the closing days of those persons who have calmly and deliberately, in no sudden heat of passion, taken away their own life.  In such cases, of course, we see the sense of failure, absolute and complete.  They have quietly resolved lo give up life as a losing game.  You remember the poor man who, having spent his last shilling, retired to a wood far from human dwellings, and there died voluntarily by starvation.  He kept a diary of those days of gradual death, setting out his feelings both of body and mind.  No nourishment passed his lips after he had chosen his last resting-place, save a little water, which he dragged himself to a pond to drink.  He was not discovered till he was dead; but his melancholy chronicle appeared to have been carried down to very near the time when he became unconscious.  I remember its great characteristic appeared to be a sense of utter failure.  There seemed to be no passion, none of the bitter desperate resolution which prompts the energetic ‘Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world;’ but merely a weary, lonely wish to creep quietly away.  I have no look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide’s grave.  I think the common English verdict is right as well as charitable, which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged, and responsibility is gone.  And what desperate misery, what a black horrible anguish of heart, whether expressing itself calmly or feverishly, must have laid its gripe upon a human being before it can overcome in him the natural clinging to life, and make him deliberately turn his back upon ’the warm precincts of the cheerful day.’  No doubt it is the saddest of all sad ends; but I do not forget that a certain Authority, the highest of all authorities, said to all human beings, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’  The writer has, in the course of his duty, looked upon more than one suicide’s dead face; and the lines of Hood appeared to sketch the fit feeling with which to do so:—­

    Owning her weakness,
        Her evil behaviour;
    And leaving, with meekness,
        Her soul to her Saviour.

What I have just written recalls to me, by some link of association, the words I once heard a simple old Scotch-woman utter by her son’s deathbed.  He was a young man of twenty-two, a pious and good young man, and I had seen him very often throughout his gradual decline.  Calling one morning, I found he was gone, and his mother begged me to come and see his face once more; and standing for the last time by him, I said (and I could say them honestly) some words of Christian comfort to the poor old woman.  I told her, in words far better than any of my own, how the Best Friend of mankind had said, ’I am the Resurrection and the Life:  he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:  and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die.’  I remember well her answer.  ‘Aye,’