life of life may come at the eleventh hour, | revolution which we may or may not conand confer a boon which, in its satisfying nect with Christianity, but which all must fulness, shall be indistinguishable from recognize as separating us from one who that which is the recompense of a life lived before Christ. We have learnt to time of well-earned success. know the might in all things feeble. We know the power of dependence. For us, even the nature that has not much other charm becomes attractive, if once it accepts the feebleness and the dependence of advanced life. Only the endeavor to conceal or defy weakness can baffle that reverence for weakness which has become an instinct of humanity.

To regard old age as a period of regret is the same kind of illusion as to suppose that distant hills are blue. We must pass through much regret before we reach old age, no doubt. It would be too much to assert that no life ever fulfilled all that it seemed to promise, and there are some lives, no doubt, that fulfil much more; still, on the whole, there are not many who would deny, in looking back on life, that it has been both more painful and more futile than they expected. It has brought much they did not venture to hope for, but it has withheld more that they made almost sure of. To wake up to the fact that our life is to be a poorer thing than we thought it would be, is a dreary experience, but it is passed long before we reach the close of our career. The main circumstances of life have then been accepted as a part of the scenery through which the pilgrimage has lain. Its mistakes have borne fruit, but the fruit has been less bitter at last than at first, and mistake and misfortune are blended to the eye of the aged as planet and constellation on the midnight sky. Nor must this be regarded as a part of the weakness of age; it is a poor and morbid vanity that refuses to let past mistake become present misfortune, and time does for us in this respect what reason might do at once, if feeling were always under its control. We speak of course of real mistake, and not of wrong-doing,

These remarks apply rather to the fictitious brilliancy attached to youth, than to the fictitious shadow cast on age, but the two are part of the same delusion. And yet, in some respects, the advantages of youth are also the advantages of age. We have allowed ourselves to apply the misleading epithet of "second childhood" to a condition that is as unlike childhood as possible, but the later stages of life correspond in many respects to its earlier ones. What we miss, in the noonday of our career, is that definiteness of relation which enriches alike its morning and its evening. It is not the selfishness of human beings which keeps them separate, so much as their blindness to each other's needs. The simplicity of the claim of childhood is a great part of its beneficent influence. Life takes its start in relation; the father and mother, brother and sister, make up the world of the child; he is the constant recipient of service that he must accept, and of direction that he must follow; and where the ideal of childhood is not flagrantly outraged, the mere position in which he stands to his parents is enough to supply all that life needs of duty and of hope. And something of the same kind may be true, and often is true, of the end of life. The distrusted heir, who has read in the grudging looks of father or uncle the constant question of Henry IV., "Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair?" finds that a time is come when his is the hand most willingly accepted, when his eyes are permitted to do duty for those that are grown dim, and when jarring views and incompatible tastes give way to the blessed simplicity of service. It is the absence of all sense of this op. portunity which is so marked in the treatise of Cicero. He knew well the influences of weakness on the baser side of our nature. Every offence is more keenly felt when it is combined with infirmity," is one of those sentences, at least in the terseness of the original, which recur to one as summing up years of experience. But he knew not that the influences which quicken distaste are capable of a ready inversion, by which they bear us far beyond the reach of dis- We sum up the advantages of age in taste; he knew not how readily the pole trite, but yet significant words, when we of the magnet might be changed, and speak of it as showing us the events of the object of revulsion might become the life under the influence of time. Time, it object of reverence. This is the great | has been said, is no agent, but we should.

แ

the sense of which is a thing so hidden and sacred that one can hardly say whether it is keener at one time of life or another, and perhaps we overrate the importance of the fact that it is not likely to find much expression after a certain time of life. At any rate, it is an advantage to escape from the regrets that are wholly unmoral.

be driven to cumbrous and misleading | that passage whether he remembered the paraphrase if we refuse to speak of its work. The objects of the external world and the events of experience bear witness with a wonderful harmony to the softening, healing influences that come with the mere rhythm of the seasons, the mere succession of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. As we wander over a ruined castle, and reflect that where the ivy flings its shining mantle and the wallflower lavishes its gold, was once a charred and blackened mass, speaking only of the horror of massacre and conflagration, we have a type of the change that comes over much experience, as we look back upon it | through the vista of years. It is not merely that all things are brought into proportion, though this is much. We should be startled, even at a time of life when youth is past, if we could look into the future, and see how changed an aspect would be taken by those events which seem to leave all their neighborhood blackened and charred. We should refuse to believe in the wonderful transmuting power which is measured by the beat of the pendulum and the great clock of the heavens, and which, at times, seems chronicled by moments and defied by years. It is not that these things grow dim. That is often true, no doubt, but we would not reckon the loss of feeling among the advantages of old age. It is not that we feel the great emotions of life less in age than in youth, but that we feel rather their meaning than their mere poignancy. A change has come over our apprehension of them, and the far-off storm reaches the ear as music. The antithesis between pain and pleasure is often lost; we turn coldly from days in which every moment seemed golden as it passed, and seek to revive every moment that, as it passed, seemed a barbed dart. This is not a description of all recollected experience; there is some pain that never loses its painfulness. But it is true of much that we could not believe time had any power to transmute, till we have left it far behind us.

closing words of the "De Senectute" with
their ardent anticipation, their thrill of
confident hope. Perhaps he would have
said that they are not the utterance of the
person in whose lips they are placed, but of
one who was destined to know nothing of
old age; and that were the actual Cato
speaking instead of the dramatizing Cic
ero, we should not hear anything of those
yearning desires which must have re-
mained with all readers, as the most stir-
ring of all heathen testimony to the im
pulse within us that points to immortality,
and which is thus cited by one as little
dependent on heathen testimony as the
poet Dante. It is true that Cicero wrote
in the fulness of a maturity which he
deemed that a resolute energy of will
could render coeval with life, and his
thirst for "the life which alone deserves
the name of life" affords no testimony
that that longing is characteristic of the
last period of our sojourn here; nor is it
from the lips of the aged that the hope
receives much encouragement, in ordinary
circumstances.
As death draws near,
men become disinclined for any contem-
plation of the experience that lies beyond
it; they are weary, and shrink from every
effort that involves emotion, even if the
emotion be one of joy. And yet surely
recollections must be present to the minds
of most of our readers of some old age
which they could least adjust to the be-
lief that the end of this life was the end
of all life, of the closing years of some
long career that affect the ear of memory
like a noble modulation bringing in a new
key, and inevitably suggesting a much
richer melody than that which it opened
in this world. As the windows were
darkened, and the grasshopper became a
burden, and as desire failed, have we not
all witnessed a revelation of new possi-
bilities, within a character long familiar,
rendering the notion that it should cease
to be as impossible as that a picture to
which we have seen the master-hand set-
ting its last touches was just about to be
committed by him to the flames? It is in
the memories bequeathed by old age, no
less than in the visions of childhood, that
we find a glimpse of those

We have lately set before our readers the striking and eloquent passage in which Mr. W. R. Greg contrasts the different coloring taken by the hopes of the future beyond the grave, in youth and age, and seems to allow that as it comes nearer, it is the less ardently desired. The desire of the old man, he would seem to imply, is not for a fresh start amid new conditions of being, but simply for a blank of all exertion and suffering. We wonder in writing | We must not look for these in conscious

obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank nisgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised;
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble, like a guilty thing surprised.

utterance; the time for anything requir- slight exertion was enough to ensure ing so much effort is in earlier life, when them and their families an abundance of the spirit can face emotion and the intel- food. Kangaroo and wallaby, opossum lect retains its spring. But they will and bandicoot, turkeys and wild fowl, are come as stars in the twilight, to the eye all plentiful and easily got at, and when that has watched the evening of mortal yams and the large potato-like roots of the life; in memories of new patience, new water-lily are added to the list it will be tenderness, new strength, when all out- seen that their diet was by no means to ward sources of strength were drying up. be despised. Did they wish for a change They will linger as a lesson of coura- they had only to take to their canoes to geous hope not only for the shortening be sure of an abundant supply of fish. future that is bounded by old age, but for Their nets, made by the gins by hand one of which they have helped us to re- out of a species of hibiscus, were of imgard many an old age, in its newness of mense size and very strong, and were genharmonious beauty, as the almost audible erally common property to three or four promise. families. Their canoes, made of bark and sewn together with thread made of hibiscus bark, are light, easily managed, and wonderfully buoyant, though an inexperienced white man on stepping into one will probably take a header into the water on the opposite side. Their weapons are stone tomahawks, spears of various patterns, some of them barbed with great ingenuity, boomerangs semi-circular pieces of wood pared so that their rotatory motion is that of a screw - which they can throw with great force and accurate aim for eighty or ninety yards; and nullas, short clubs with a knobbed head, which they use both for throwing and hand-to-hand fighting. A heavy two

66

From The Pall Mall Gazette. BLACKS IN QUEENSLAND. Of all the races to whom the contact of civilization has been fatal, there is none more swiftly or surely dying out than the Queensland blackfellow. 'Dispersed" by the native police, poisoned by fiery colonial rum, and if all stories be true more than occasionally by other potent means, shot down in new country by every white man who sees them, until the survivors are glad of peace at any price, it is no matter for wonder that the strong-handed wooden sword and a shield comest tribe is soon reduced to a tithe of its former numbers. And yet before the whites came among them their life was not an unhappy one, especially in the coast districts, where game is more plentiful than inland, and where they seldom know a day's hunger. Each tribe had its own recognized head, who ruled by virtue of his superior fighting qualities, but whose control over the rest was but slight. Each tribe had also its own district, out of which they seldom ventured except in time of war or when attempting to carry off a damsel from a neighboring camp. Each small collection of families had their own totem or crest, and scrupulously abstained from killing or eating the animal whose name they bore. Their moral character would then have compared not unfavorably with that of more civilized nations. Their marriage laws were very strict, and no intermarriage was permitted between members of the same family. They were polygamous, but adultery was almost unknown, and surely punished by death. Honest to each other, pilfering was not one of their vices, and each tribe was almost a small commune. Living in a land of plenty, a very

plete the list of their offensive and defensive weapons. The use of the bow and arrow is fortunately unknown to them, except in the extreme north-east of the colony, where they have a considerable dash of Malay blood, and are frequently visited by blacks from the south of New Guinea, which is only about ninety miles distant. The only poison of which they have found out the use is the bark of a species of myrtle, which, being pounded up and then thrown into the water, sickens the fish and brings them to the surface where they become an easy prey. Their knowledge of medicine is very slight, but then they are, or rather were, rarely sick. The bite of a scorpion or centipede they cure by sucking and chewing the spot that was bitten. The bite of a deathadder or any deadly snake of which there are but two or three sorts they do not attempt to cure, but quietly lie down, and amid the howls of their relations await the death that speedily fol lows the bite. A severe flesh wound they plaster up with mud and keep moist for a few days, and cure in this manner some frightful-looking wounds. A broken bone they set to the best of their ability, and

the result is usually a crooked or short- pitiate him by prayer or sacrifice. One ened limb. Measles they cure (?) by get-of their modes of execution is curious. ting into a water-hole, and sitting there When the death of a member of the tribe with their heads out until they recover, as has been determined on by the elders, the they very rarely do from this, to them, unsuspecting victim is made insensible by terrible scourge. As for clothing, they a blow on the head, and his kidney fat is content themselves with the costume of taken out through a small slit made beour first parents in their days of inno- tween the ribs. He wakes with probably cence, though occasionally, on grand oc- a headache and certainly a sore side, but casions, the young gins wear a plaited recovers sufficiently to go about for two loin-cloth. During the short Queensland or three days, when he dies vomiting inwinter they use possum rugs, which they cessantly. The blacks who are not in the make very neatly. Their houses consist secret are told, and believe, that a snake of three or four sheets of bark put up in made the cut and got into the body, and a semi-circle on the windy side of a small so caused death; and as the wretched fire, round which they lie. Their only man is dying the old blacks who alone are time of hardship is during the wet sea- allowed to get rid of their enemies in this son, when sometimes it rains incessantly fashion pretend to see the snake coming for a fortnight, and they have some diffi- out of his mouth. Formerly they used to culty in getting about after the game, and cremate their dead with considerable cerecannot fish in the flooded creeks. Their mony, but now they bury like whites. life, before the whites came, was as happy That they were at one time cannibals an animal existence as could be imagined. there is no reason to doubt; and in the Plenty to eat and drink and little else to older days, when white men were not do, a genial climate, and few enemies, unfrequently surprised and killed, their what more could any savage desire? Of a cooked and half-eaten remains were refuture state of existence they had not the peatedly found in the blacks' camp by the faintest idea. They had laws; but they avenging native police. Of cultivation knew that if they broke them a blow on they are guiltless; they get their food the head from a nulla or a spear through | with little trouble, so have no inducement the body would be the result, so they to work. Now that they are half-civilized, wisely abstained. Superstitious, like all their old customs and laws are nearly forignorant races, they had a sort of idea of gotten; their marriage laws are no longer some evil power, who sent snakes and kept as of yore, and the few survivors are crocodiles and similar troubles, but they allowed to follow their inclinations regardnever went to the length of trying to pro- less of relationship.

DIA.

A NEW WHEAT-BEARING DISTRICT IN IN- soil so rich in alluvial deposit from the HimaThe India Office is lending its sanction layas that we may reasonably anticipate the just now to an enormous scheme for the recla- time when a great region, now suffering only mation of the waste lands of the Punjab. The from want of water, will become the great waters of the five rivers which give a name to wheat-bearing territory of India. Some porthat region flow wastefully away to the sea, tions of the great doab which it is proposed to leaving a large tract of desert land, some of reclaim-a doab fifty thousand square miles which was once fertile, to be the home of noth-in extent - have undoubtedly been both ining and nobody. Those same rivers are sufficient to make that same desert blossom as a rose. The work of cutting canals, which would afford means both for navigation and irrigation, would be enormous; but so far is it thought feasible that the India Office has undertaken to use the canals, paying tolls for its transit, and to buy the irrigating water, undertaking on its own account to collect the water rent from the natives. Engineering experts declare that the special work can easily be done, and reports have been made to the India Office which show that the land to be reclaimed has

habited and highly fertile in their day. In some cases the canal is almost made, the unused bed of diverted rivers lying ready to be again filled with the life-giving stream. So that the earlier portion of the great work will be comparatively easy. But, whether easy or hard, the reclamation of fifty thousand square miles of land in an over-populated country, the irrigation of a tract so enormous in a country visited so frequently by famine, is a task the magnificence of which, from an engineering and from a political point of view, almost overweights the imagination.

Farmer.

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