Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/264

People talk a great deal about that physical impossibility which they are pleased to term "a broken heart;" and the sufferer who claims their sympathy under such an abnormal affliction is invariably a young person of the gentler sex. I have no doubt in my own mind, nevertheless, that a severe blow to the fortunes, the self-esteem, the health, or the affections, is far more severely felt after forty than before thirty; and yet who ever heard of an elderly gentleman breaking his heart? Anything else you please, his word, his head, his waistcoat-strings, or even his neck, but his heart! Why, the assumption is ludicrous. If you consult the statistics of suicide, however, you will be suprised to find in how many instances this most reckless of crimes is committed by persons of mature age, though it is strange that those whose span in the course of nature is likely to be so short