slumber was calling to her to cease, while my bloodless brain only caught fugitive fragments from the legends of Don Quixote or Gil Blas. Then we would try to sleep; but as soon as the light was put out and the story put away, wakefulness would come to me with a yearning for the happy unconsciousness of sleep. And then some tag of painfully appropriate poetry would begin to haunt me—

"O Sleep! it is a pleasant thing,

Beloved from pole to pole."

But though the lines would jingle in my ears, the blissful sleep did not glide into my soul.

One day during such weary experiences my wife said to me, "Why not paint?" Paint! I had never had a lesson in my life. life. Was it not Çato that began to learn Greek at sixty? That was more reasonable and possible than that I could learn to paint at fifty-three! However, if I could not paint, I might play the fool with colours, and a paint brush is not too great a weight for a tired hand. I copied some water colours, and a fine mess of things I made; but at length I amused myself with clumsy efforts to give form to passing fancies. I suppose I felt like the builders of our abbeys and cathedrals when they were left free to run riot with their imagination over fantastic designs for gargoyles or the mouths of water spouts.

I tried painting objects--a glass filled with flowers; but my wayward fancy scorned to be tied within such limits. There is a curious humorous instinct which visits us in times of illness, and I wanted to be amused; and so I tried to amuse myself. If the reader will forgive the exhibition.

of my frailty, he shall have the opportunity of laughing with me, or at me, as the mood may suit him.

Here are some of them. Call them the perverse fancies of a sick brain if you will; yet they served to pass away some weary hours, in which strenuous effort of body and mind were alike out of my power.

They will explain themselves; but I make a few notes here. The death duties, or rather the ways in which they are levied, seem to me neither wise nor considerate. The hour of death brings sorrow and distraction enough, without adding the inquisitorial power which comes to reduce resources at a time when, perhaps, financial pressure is great. If the Government had adopted the suggestion of a wellknown banker, the country would have benefited in revenue and the present harsh and oppressive system would have given place to a method more generally acceptable. But the British public show great patience and forbearance, even if they do not manifest much wit, in allowing the present unwise and burdensome system to remain.

The banker's suggestion was that the death duties should be raised by a system of insurance payments, and that the Government should be their own insurers. An annual payment would gladly be borne by many whose great desire is to secure the welfare of wife and children. Such a system would have given to the Government a much steadier revenue, besides the possible profit on the insurance business.