Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/59

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GOURDS.
51

round the crushed remains of Tippoo Sahib's victims is to-day lowered in honour of our own jeunesse dorée, with whom a run through British India is considered little more of an expedition than a jaunt into Welsh Wales.

Cornaro, if I remember right, fixes the normal duration of life, in the Mammalia, at a term of five times the number of years required to reach their prime. Thus a dog, he says, comes to maturity at two, and lives till ten; a horse at five, and lives till five-and-twenty; and arguing by analogy, a man, who only attains his full strength at twenty-three or four, should not, therefore, if he led a natural and rational life, succumb till he had arrived at a hundred and fifteen or twenty years.

Forbid it, Atropos! for their sakes as well as ours. Think of the old fogies, now sufficiently numerous, who would overflow