PHILOSOPHERS.
We are all different, and often our differences are of the widest. Some men can be knocked prostrate by the most trifling disappointment, while others can extract comfort or even positive benefit from what looks like complete disaster—such as the Cambridge youth I met last week, raving about Turner's "Fighting Téméraire."
"But I didn't know you were interested in pictures," I said.
"Oh, yes, I've always been, in a way," he replied; "but it wasn't till the rain ruined the first day of the Varsity match that I ever had a real chance to get to the National Gallery, and when it came down like blazes again on Tuesday I went back there. Did you ever see such painting? And the pathos of it too! And then that frosty morning scene in the same room! Why, Turner was too wonderful."
How some of the other dampened enthusiasts tided over their loss I can only guess; but this ardent one reminded me of the Shipwrecked Entomologist, and I placed him on a niche somewhere near that radiant soul.
And who was he?
Well, he was the curator of his own department in some Indian museum—I think at Calcutta—and when the time came for his holiday he took a passage for Japan on a little tramp steamer. Everything went well until a few hours out of Shanghai, when a typhoon began to blow with terrific force. The ship was driven on the coast of Korea, where she set about breaking up, and only with the greatest difficulty did the passengers and crew get to shore, bruised and saturated, without anything but their clothes and what their pockets could hold. Some lives were lost, but my man was saved.
It was a desolate part, with nothing but the poorest huts for shelter, dirty and verminous, so that the discomforts of the land were almost equal to the perils of the sea.
Naturally, on his return to Calcutta the curator was plied with questions. How did be feel about it? Wasn't it an awful experience? If ever a man deserved sympathy it was he. And so forth. But he wouldn't rise.
"Sympathy?" he said. "Good Heavens! I don't want sympathy. Why, I had the time of my life. Do you know that during the night in that Korean hovel I found five absolutely new kinds of bug."
E.V.L.
"Notice to the public, that John ——, Toronto, will not be responsible for debts hereafter contracted by any one."—Canadian Paper.
Very sensible of him.
