ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in six weeks.  If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone, persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the bearer is ready to let fall.

Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death.  The chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people.  As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.

And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.  If you can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children cannot.  And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.

After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be right.

This repetition of the above words,—­gentleman and lady,—­which could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me how much use is made of them by those who ought to know what they mean.  Thus, at a marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman? how do you think the officiating clergyman put the questions?  It was, Do you, MISS So and So, take this GENTLEMAN? and, Do you, MR. This or That, take this LADY?!  What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a time?

I don’t doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she happened to have been in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered these monstrous words—­monstrous in such a connection—­had known the ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,—­had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,—­so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,—­the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism.  Any persons whom it could please have no better notion of what the words referred to signify than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.