The same in the animal creation. Like Minerva from the brain of Jove, the butterfly springs into its sunny existence, winged, armed, and clothed in gorgeous apparel, all at once; but when the night-breeze shakes the perfume from your garden-flowers, and the evening bank of clouds is coming up from the west, you look for that ephemeral masterpiece in vain. Now the elephant only attains his majority, so to speak, when between forty and fifty years of age; therefore he has hardly become an “old rogue” at two hundred, and the identical proboscis that saluted Clyde, or curled round the crushed remains of Tippoo Sahib’s victims, is to-day lowered in honour of our own _jeunesse dorée_, with whom a run through British India is considered little more of an expedition than a jaunt into Welsh Wales. Cornaro, if I remember right, fixes the normal duration of life, in the Mammalia, at a term of five times the number of years required to reach their prime. Thus a dog, he says, comes to maturity at two, and lives till ten; a horse at five, and lives till five-and-twenty; and, arguing by analogy, a man, who only attains his full strength at twenty-three or four, should not, therefore, if he led a natural and rational life, succumb till he had arrived at a hundred and fifteen or twenty years. Forbid it, Atropos! for their sakes as well as ours. Think of the old fogies, now sufficiently numerous, who would overflow the clubs! Think, when it came to our own turn, of the numbers of Gourds we should have raised, outlived, buried, but, alas! not forgotten. “A fine old man, sir!” said one of the best judges of human nature that ever fathered a proverb. “There’s no such thing. If his head or his heart had been worth anything, they would have worn him out years ago!” “You have got off the subject as usual,” objected Bones, “and are trenching on a topic of which you are far less qualified to speak than myself. What do you know about the duration of life, the ceaseless wear-and-tear, the gradual decay, the last flickers of the candle, leaping up, time after time, with delusive strength, until it goes out once for all? You can tell where Noah was, but do you know where the candle went to when it left the great sea-captain in the dark? Not you! Never mind, don’t fret, you will find out some day sure enough, and be as wise as ‘Tullus, Ancus, good Eneas,’ and the rest of us! In the meantime stick to your text. The morbid spirit possesses you, and well I know it will only come out of the man with much talking. If it does you any good, never mind _me_—fire away! Tell us something more about the Gourd, and the worm that smote it. That is what you are driving at, I feel sure.”