One of the advantages of the sick-bed telephone lies in the fact that it can be used for preservation of “last words.” Hitherto those only of men who died surrounded by attentive friends have had a chance of getting before the public; those of the unfortunate infectionary, isolated from his race and dying in a pesthouse, assisted by hireling physicians and unsympathetic nurses, have been lost to the world. No matter how many years of his life the patient may have been engaged in their composition and rehearsal; no matter how “neat and opprobrious” they were, they fell upon unappreciative ears, and were not recorded. Under the new _régime_ the patient as his fire fails may summon his friends to the telephone, launch at them his Parthian platitude and die in the pleasant consciousness that posterity will have profit of his death. Whether, like Falstaff, he choose to give his remarks a reminiscent character and “babble o’ green fields;” confine himself to the historical method, like Daniel Webster with his memorable “I still live;” assume the benevolent pose, and, like Charles II, urge the survivors not to let some “poor Nelly” starve; the exclamatory, like the late President Garfield, who, according to one Swaim, said “O Swaim!” and let it go at that; or the merely idiotic, like the great Napoleon with his “_Tête d’armée_,” the faithful telephone will be there, ready and willing to transmit (and transmute) the sentiment, admonition, statement or whatever it may be. To persons intending to make this use of the telephone a word of counsel may not be impertinent. As no human being, however well-eared, ever understood the telephone until it had repeated itself a number of times in response to his demands for more light, and as the moribund are not commonly in very good voice, it will be wise to begin the “last words” while there is yet a little reserve fund of life and strength remaining, for repetition and explanation. THE CHAIR OF LITTLE EASE Not many years ago, as I remember, a deal of deprecatory talk was in evolution about a certain Governor of a Persian province, who was said to have been boiled alive by order of the Shah. Our shouting and shrilling in this matter were not altogether becoming, considering whose progeny we are. It is not so very long since all the nations of Europe practised boiling alive—commonly in oil, which was thought to impart a fine discomfort to the person so unlucky as to be in the cauldron. In England boiling was the legal punishment for poisoners for a long time, beginning in 1531, in the reign of Henry VII. Among those who suffered this discomfort was a man mentioned in the chronicle of the Grey Friars, who was let down into the kettle by a chain until he was done. He, however, was not boiled in oil—just plain. Some of the items of an expense account relating to the execution of Friar Stone at Canterbury are interesting in their homely way: