for hanging and drowning is to be attributed to this "insular situation."
Every man and woman of us is indeed a self _pluviometer_, or rain-gauge;
or, in plain terms, our nerves are like so many musical strings, affected
by every change of the atmosphere, which, if screwed up too tight, are apt
to snap off, and become useless; or, if you please, we are like so many
barometers, and our animal spirits like their quicksilver; so "servile"
are we to all the "skyey influences." Take, for example, the same man at
three different periods of the year: on a fine morning in January, his
nerves are braced to their best pitch, and, in his own words, he is fit
for any thing; see him panting for cooling streams in a burning July day,
when though an Englishman, he is "too hot to eat;" see him on a wet, muggy
ninth of November, when the finery of the city coach and the new liveries
appear tarnished, and common councilmen tramp through the mud and rain in
their robes of little authority--even with the glorious prospect of the
Guildhall tables, the glitter of gas and civic beauty, and the six pounds
of turtle, and iron knives and forks before him--still he is a miserable
creature, he drinks to desperation, and is carried home at least three
hours sooner than he would be on a fine frosty night. Then, instead of
fifteen pounds to the square inch, atmospheric pressure is increased to
five-and-forty, not calculating the _simoom_ of the following morning,
when he is as dry as the desert of Sahara, and eyes the pumps and
soda-water fountains with as much _gout_ as the Israelites did the water
from Mount Horeb.

Man, however, is the most helpless of all creatures in water, and with the
exception of a few proscribed pickpockets and swindlers, he is almost as
helpless on land. This infirmity, or difficulty of keeping above water,
accounts for the crammed state of our prisons, fond as we are of the
element. On the great rivers of China, where thousands of people find it
more convenient to live in covered boats upon the water, than in houses on