"Oh! no," he replied, "it is impossible. My back is shot through. Beatty will tell you so." Hardy then, once more, shook hands with him, and with a heart almost bursting, hastened upon deck.

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By this time all feeling below the breast was gone; and Nelson, having made the surgeon ascertain this, said to him, "You know I am gone. I know it. I feel something rising in my breast,' putting his hand on his left side," which tells me so." And upon Beatty's inquiring whether his pain was very great, he replied, great, that he wished he was dead. Yet," said he, in a lower voice, one would like to live a little longer, too!" And after a few minutes, in the same undertone, he added, "What would become of poor Lady Hamilton, if she knew my situation!" Next to his country she occupied his thoughts. Captain Hardy, some fifty minutes after he had left the cockpit, returned; and, again taking the hand of his dying friend and commander, congratulated him on having gained a complete victory. How many of the enemy were aken he did not know, as it was impossible to perceive them distinctly; but fourteen or fifteen at least. That's well," cried Nelson, "but I bargained for twenty." And then, in a stronger voice, he said: Anchor, Hardy; anchor." Hardy, upon this, hinted that Admiral Collingwood would take upon himself the direction of affairs. "Not while I live, Hardy," said the dying Nelson, ineffectually endeavouring to raise himself from the bed: "do you anchor." His previous orders for preparing to anchor had shown how clearly he foresaw the necessity of this. Presently, calling Hardy back, he said to him in a low voice, "Don't throw me overboard;" and he desired that he might be buried by his parents, unless it should please the king to order otherwise. Then reverting to private feelings: "Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy take care of poor Lady Hamilton. Kiss me, Hardy," said he. Hardy knelt down and kissed his cheek; and Nelson said, "Now I am satisfied. Thank God I have done my duty!" Hardy stood over him in silence for a moment or two, then knelt again and kissed his forehead. 66 'Who is that ?" said Nelson; and being informed, he replied, “ God bless you, Hardy!" And Hardy then left him-for ever. Nelson now desired to be turned upon his right side, and said, “I wish I had not left the deck; for I shall soon be gone." Death was, indeed, rapidly approaching. He said to the chaplain, "Doctor, I have not been a great sinner;" and after a short pause, Remember that I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter Horatia as a legacy to my country." His articulation now became difficult; but he was distinctly heard to say, "Thank God, I have done my duty!" These words he repeatedly pronounced; and they were the last words which he uttered. He expired at thirty minutes after four,-three hours and a quarter after he had received his wound.

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The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a public calamity: men started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was

suddenly taken from us; and it seemed as if we had never till then known how deeply we loved and reverenced him. What the country had lost in its great naval hero-the greatest of our own and of all former times-was scarcely taken into the account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed his part, that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was considered at an end. The fleets of the enemy were not merely defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their invading our shores could again be contemplated. It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him : the general sorrow was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that funeral ceremonies, and public monuments, and posthumous rewards, were all which they could now bestow upon him whom the king, the legislature, and the nation would have alike delighted to honour; whom every tongue would have blessed; whose presence in every village through which he might have passed would have wakened the church-bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children from their sports to gaze upon him, and "old men from their chimney-corner" to look upon Nelson ere they died. The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy: for such already was the glory of the British navy, through Nelson's surpassing genius, that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the most signal victory that ever was achieved upon the seas; and the destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime schemes of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add to our security or strength; for, while Nelson was living to watch the combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure as now, when they were no longer in existence.

There was reason to suppose, from the appearances upon opening his body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have fallen prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be lamented, who died so full of honours, and at the height of human fame. The most triumphant death is that of the martyr; the most awful that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid that of the hero in the hour of victory; and if the chariot and the horses of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory. He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name and an example which are at this hour inspiring thousands of the youth of England-a name which is our pride, and an example which will continue to be our shield and our strength. Thus it is that the spirits of the great and the wise continue to live and to act after them.

THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE.

DOUGLAS JERROLD.

[Douglas William Jerrold was born in London 1803. In his tenth year he was sent to sea, but after serving two years was apprenticed to a printer in London. His nautical drama "Black-eyed Susan" first brought him into notice, but his subsequent dramatic writings, which were numerous, were of a far higher character. Mr. Jerrold was one of the first, and for some time the leading, contributors to Punch. In 1852 he became editor of Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, which post he held to his death in 1857. His collected works are published in six vols., forming a mine of wit, wisdom, and recreative literature.] IN Surrey, some three miles from Chertsey, is a quiet, sequestered nook, called Shepperton Green. At the time whereof we write, the olden charity dwelt in an old workhouse-a primitive abiding place for the broken ploughman, the palsied shepherd, the old, old peasant, for whom nothing more remained in this world but to die. The governor of this abode of benevolence dwelt in the lower part of the building, and therein, as the village trade might fluctuate, made or mended shoes. Let the plain truth be said the governor was a cobbler. Within a stone's cast of the workhouse was a little white gate, swung between two hedge-banks in the road to Chertsey. Here, pass when you would, stood an old man, whose self-imposed office it was to open the gate; for the which service the passenger would drop some small benevolence in the withered hand of the aged peasant. This man was a pauper-one of the almsmen of the village workhouse. There was a custom-whether established by the governor aforesaid, or by predecessors of a vanished century, we know not-that made it the privilege of the oldest pauper to stand the porter at the gate; his perquisite, by right of years, the halfpence of the rare pedestrian. As the senior died, the living senior succeeded to the office. Now the gate and now the grave.

And this is all the history? All. The story is told-it will not bear another syllable. The "Old Man" is at the gate; the custom which places him there has been made known, and with it ends the narrative.

How few the incidents of life-how multitudinous its emotions! How flat, monotonous may be the circumstance of daily existence, and yet how various the thoughts which spring from it! Look at yonder landscape, broken into hill and dale, with trees of every hue and form, and water winding in silver threads through velvet fields. How beautiful—for how various! Cast your eye over that moor; it is ílat and desolate-barren as barren rock. Not so. Seek the soil, and then, with nearer gaze, contemplate the wondrous forms and colours of the thousand mosses growing there; give ear to the hum of busy life sounding at every root of poorest grass. Listen! Does not the heart of the earth beat audibly beneath this seeming barrenness-audibly as where the corn grows and the grape ripens? Is it not so with the veriest rich and the veriest poor-with the most active and with apparently the most inert!

That "Old Man at the Gate" has eighty years upon his headeighty years, covering it with natural reverence. He was once in London-only once. This pilgrimage excepted, he has never journeyed twenty miles from the cottage in which he was born; of which he became the master; whereto he brought his wife; where his children saw the light, and their children after; where many of them died; and whence, having with a stout soul fought against the strengthening ills of poverty and old age, he was thrust by want and sickness out, and with a stung heart, he laid his bones upon a workhouse bed.

Life to the "Old Man" has been one long path across a moora flat, unbroken journey; the eye uncheered, the heart unsatisfied. Coldness and sterility have compassed him round. Yet has he been subdued to the blankness of his destiny? Has his mind remained the unwrit page that schoolmen talk of has his heart become a clod? Has he been made by poverty a moving imageplough-guiding, corn-thrashing instrument? Have not unutterable thoughts sometimes stirred within his brain-thoughts that elevated, yet confused him with a sense of eternal beauty-coming upon him like the spiritual presences to the shepherds? Has he not been beset by the inward and mysterious yearning of the heart towards the unknown and the unseen? He has been a ploughman. In the eye of the well-to-do, dignified with the accomplishments of reading and writing, is he of little more intelligence than the oxen treading the glebe. Yet, who shall say that the influence of nature-that the glories of the rising sun-may not have called forth harmonies of soul from the rustic drudge, the moving statue of a man!

That worn-out, threadbare remnant of humanity at the gate; age makes it reverend, and the inevitable-shall inevitable be said? -injustice of the world, invests it with majesty; the majesty of suffering meekly borne, and meekly decaying. "The poor shall never cease out of the land." This text the self-complacency of competence loveth to quote: it hath a melody in it, a lulling sweetness to the selfishness of our nature. Hunger and cold and nakedness are the hard portion of man; there is no help for it; rags must flutter about us; man, yes, even the strong man, his only wealth (the wealth of Adam) wasting in his bones, must hold his pauper hand to his brother of four meals per diem; it is a necessity of nature, and there is no help for it. And thus some men send their consciences to sleep by the chinking of their own purses. Necessity of evil is an excellent philosophy, applied to everybody but --ourselves.

These easy souls will see nothing in our "Old Man at the Gate" but a pauper, let out of the workhouse, for the chance of a few halfpence. Surely, he is something more! He is old; very old. Every day, every hour, earth has less claim in him. He is so old, so feeble, that even as you look he seems sinking. At sunset, he is scarcely the man who opened the gate to you in the morning. Yet there is no disease in him—none. He is dying of old age. He is working out that most awful problem of life-slowly, solemnly. He

is now, the badged pauper-and now, in the unknown country with Solomon !

Can man look upon a more touching solemnity? There stands the old man, passive as a stone, nearer, every moment, to churchyard clay! It was only yesterday that he took his station at the gate. His predecessor held the post for two years; he too daily, daily dying

"Till like a clock, worn out with eating time,

The weary wheels of life at length stood still."

How long will the present watcher survive? In that very uncertainty in the very hoariness of age which brings home to us that uncertainty-there is something that makes the old man sacred; for, in the course of nature, is not the oldest man the nearest to the angels ?

Yet, away from these thoughts, there is reverence due to that old man. What has been his life? A war with suffering. What a beautiful world is this! How rich and glorious! How abundant in blessings-great and little-to thousands! What a lovely place hath God made it; and how have God's creatures darkened and outraged it to the wrong of one another! Well, what had this man of the world? What stake, as the effrontery of selfishness has it? The wild-fox was better cared for. Though preserved some day to be killed, it was preserved until then. What did this old man inherit? Toil, incessant toil, with no holiday of the heart: he came into the world a badged animal of labour; the property of animals. What was the earth to him ?-a place to die in.

"The poor shall never cease out of the land." Shall we then, accommodating our sympathies to this hard necessity, look serenely down upon the wretched? Shall we preach only comfort to ourselves from the doomed condition of others? It is an easy philosophy; so easy there is but little wonder it is so well exercised.

But "The Old Man at the Gate" has, for seventy years, worked and worked; and what his closing reward? The workhouse. Shall we not, some of us, blush crimson at our own world-successes, pondering the destitution of our worthy, single-hearted fellows? Should not affluence touch its hat to "The Old Man at the Gate" with a reverence for the years upon him; he-the born soldier of poverty, doomed for life to lead life's forlorn hope? Thus considered, surely Dives may unbonnet to Lazarus.

To our mind, the venerableness of age made the "Old Man at the Gate" something like a spiritual presence. He was so old, who could say how few the pulsations of his heart between him and the grave? But there he was with a meek happiness upon him; gentle cheerful. He was not built up in bricks and mortar; but was still in the open air, with the sweetest influences about him; the skythe trees-the green sward,—and flowers with the breath of God in them!

(By permission of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans.)