the guard of the train. His nature was so simple and generous that he did not even then seem to realize that he had done an exceptionally kind action.
A volume might perhaps be filled with an account of Mr. Buckland's eccentricities. When he was studying oysters, he would never allow any one to speak; the oysters, he said, overheard the conversation, and shut up their shells. More inanimate objects than oysters were endowed by him with sense. He had almost persuaded himself that inanimate things could be spiteful; and he used to say that he would write a book on their spitefulness. If a railway-lamp did not burn properly, he would declare it was sulky, and throw it out of window to see if it could find a better master. He punished his portmanteau on one occasion by knocking it down, and the portmanteau naturally revenged itself by breaking all the bottles of specimens which it contained, and emptying their contents on its master's shirts. To provide himself against possible disasters, he used to carry with him an armory of implements. On the herring inquiry he went to Scotland with six boxes of cigars, four dozen pencils, five knives, and three thermometers. On his return, three weeks afterward, he produced one solitary pencil, the remnant of all this property. The knives were lost, the cigars were smoked; one thermometer had lost its temper, and been thrown out of window; another had been drowned in the Pentland Frith, and a third had beaten out its own brains against the bottom of a gunboat. No human being could have told the fate of the pencils.
Such were some of the eccentricities of a man who will, it may be hoped, be recollected by the public for the work which he did, and by his friends for his kindliness, his humor, and his worth. As he lived, so he died. Throughout a long and painful illness his spirits never failed, and his love of fun never ceased. "I wish to be present at this operation," was his quaint reply to the proposal of his surgeon that he should take chloroform, and his wonderful vitality enabled him to survive for months under sufferings which would have crushed other men. He is gone: his work is of the past; and posterity will coldly examine its merits. But his friends will not patiently wait the verdict of posterity. When they recollect his rare powers of observation, his capacity of expressing his ideas, his quaint humor, his kindly heart, and open hand, they will say with the writer, we shall not soon look on his like again.—Macmillan's Magazine.
