By tie Rev. A. C, Smith, M.A. 321 



rumours of actual occurrences, passing through many mouths, would 

 reach the ears o£ these isolated villagers in anything but their 

 original truth ; and we may conceive what a strange and ridiculous 

 mass of fiction, the offspring of ignorance, exaggeration, and super- 

 stition, must have circulated amongst the unsophisticated inhabitants 

 of our village : and when news of even the greatest events at length 

 reached the parish, there was doubtless a large admixture of addition, 

 springing from the fancy of the relater, or a dilution of the original 

 circumstance : moreover the gravest occurrences to the welfare of 

 the State may probably have taken place many weeks before tidings 

 of them would have reached our retired village.^ 



There is a story told of a solitary inhabitant of a little island in 

 the Baltic, who resigned himself every autumn, when the ice began 

 to accumulate, to a lonely life of six months^ isolation from the rest 

 of mankind, till the thaw set in and opened a communication for 

 him with the outer world, in the spring. What his employment 

 was, and why he shut himself up alone, I have forgotten : but the 

 point which impressed itself on my mind was that this recluse was 

 a great politician, and liked to read the papers every day, and know 

 what was going on in the world: but, inasmuch as he was cut oflF 

 for six good months and more from his supply of newspapers, he 

 adopted the remarkable device of putting himself back just one year 

 behind the rest of the world ; and so he could take with him to his 

 winter quarters all the journals of the previous twelve-months, and 

 when November the first came, he would open the paper with that 

 date on the top, regardless of the figures which followed it, and 

 revel in the news of the day ; and so on with each subsequent day 

 throughout the winter: and what mattered it to him that the 

 occurrences therein recorded had happened just one year before? he 

 had his news and enjoyed it, and what harm if he was just one year 

 in arrear of the rest of mankind ? 



1 During a three months' tour in the interior of Norway in 1850, when that 

 primitive country was almost unknown to the British tourist, and internal com- 

 munication was of the most limited order, a» soon as I had left the capital, I was 

 wholly cut off from all letters and newspapers for many weeks, and the great 

 loss which England sustained in the death of Sir Robert Peel was not known to 

 me until two months after the sad accident occurred. 

 VOL. XVIII. NO. LIV. 2. A 



