Speerin’, I should mention, for the benefit of those ignorant of Lowland Scotch, means asking or inquiring.

It is recorded in history that a certain Mr. Anderson, who filled the dignified office of Provost of Dundee, died, as even provosts must.  It was resolved that a monument should be erected in his memory, and that the inscription upon it should be the joint composition of four of his surviving colleagues in the magistracy.  They met to prepare the epitaph; and after much consideration it was resolved that the epitaph should be a rhymed stanza of four lines, of which lines each magistrate should contribute one.  The senior accordingly began, and having deeply ruminated he produced the following:—­

    Here lies Anderson, Provost of Dundee.

This formed a neat and striking introduction, going (so to speak) to the heart of things at once, but leaving room for subsequent amplification.  The second magistrate perceived this, and felt that the idea was such a good one that it ought to be followed up.  He therefore produced the line,

    Here lies Him, here lies He: 

thus repeating in different modifications the same grand thought, after the style which has been adopted by Burke, Chalmers, Melvill, and other great orators.  The third magistrate, whose turn had now arrived, felt that the foundation had thus been substantially laid down, and that the time had come to erect upon it a superstructure of reflection, inference, or exclamation.  With the simplicity of genius he wrote as follows, availing himself of a poet’s license to slightly alter the ordinary forms of language:—­

    Hallelujah, Hallelujee!

The epitaph being thus, as it were, rounded and complete, the fourth contributor to it found himself in a difficulty; wherefore add anything to that which needed and in truth admitted nothing more?  Still the stanza must he completed.  What should he do?  He would fall back on the earliest recollections of his youth—­he 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