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and then one night might amply suffice to do what was thought so hurriedly done in ten times seven. Considerably more miraculous, and not a little ludicrous, is what Colman the Younger tells us of his father's friend, George Keate, the editor of Prince Lee-Boo's memoirs. He had been at a play, in a side-box of one of the London theatres, when there was a cry of "Fire!" "I was excessively frightened," said Mr. Keate; "so much so, indeed, that when I had got home, and, thanks to Providence, had escaped, though the alarm was a false one, I found that my eyebrows and eyelashes had dropped off, through apprehension; and they never, as you may perceive, sir, have grown again." George Colman professes to have heard much of the effects of fear, such as the hair standing on end, and even turning grey on a sudden; but of its causing eyebrows and eyelashes instantly to vanish, in the side-box of a theatre, unless they were false ones, and shaken off in a squeeze to get out, he owns to having never before or since met with an example. There is almost as much of the preternatural about this story, as in that of Ænobarbus, or Yellow-beard, in Plutarch —the man, namely, whom Castor and Pollux met with in the market-place, fresh from victory in battle, and whose beard they stroked as he listened with surprise to their recital-which said beard incontinently and ex ipso facto turned from deep black to flagrant yellow. The credibility of which legend would, to popular logic-the logic of Smith the Weaver-be amply guaranteed by the existence

in Rome, ages later, of a family of Enobarbi: how else could they have come by such a name?

Montesquieu, in the Persian Letters, introduces the story of Mahomet summoning Japhet from the grave, to convince an inquiring Jew upon certain vexed questions. "Il fit sur sa main, avec de la boue, la figure d'un homme; il la jeta à terre, et lui cria: Levez-vous. Sur le champ, un homme se leva, et dit: Je suis Japhet, fils de Noë. Avais-tu les cheveux blancs quand tu es mort? lui dit le saint prophète. Non, repondit-il; mais, quand tu m'as reveillé, j'ai cru que le jour du jugement était venu; et j'ai en une si grande frayeur, que mes cheveux ont blanchi tout-à-coup." Not more instantaneous the transformation of Odysseus, as operated upon by Athenè, when, soon as she touched him with her powerful wand, not only a swift old age o'er all his members spread, but

A sudden frost was sprinkled on his head.

Physical exhaustion has been known to result in the same issue as mental excitement. When Robert Story, the well-known minister of Roseneath, was in his sixteenth year, he one day walked to Edinburgh from Kelso, with his fast friend and companion, Thomas Pringle,-an author still of repute in Scottish literature. Story was "nearly blind with fatigue," by the time they reached the capital, and "next morning his hair was here and there streaked with grey." His biographer adds that, "by the time he reached the meridian of life, his

'locks, divinely spreading,' were 'white as snow in Salmon.'"

But let us pass on to some noteworthy samples of the white hairs that come of overwhelming terror and affright.

Describing the course of events in France during the year which witnessed the treaty of Nemours (1585), M. Michelet tells us, repeating the on dit of the time-a troublesome time-that when the poor King of Navarre heard of that treaty, the effect of which was to put Henry III. into the hands of the Ligue, his moustache turned white before next morning, and all because of that bit of bad news. “On dit que sa moustache en blanchit en une nuit. Il se croyait perdu."-Montaigne records of his intimate friend D'Andelot, Governor of Saint Quentin, that one part of his beard was white, and one of his eyebrows,—the change having come upon him all in an instant, "one day that he was sitting at home full of grief at the death of a brother of his, whom the Duke of Alva had put to death as an accomplice of the Counts Egmont and Horn: he had been leaning his head on his hand, at the place where the hair was now white, and when he rose, those who were with him thought the changed colour was flour, which by some chance had fallen upon those parts. It had remained so ever since."

When the Duke of Nemours was seized, by order of Lewis XI., in 1477, he was "first thrown into a tower of Pierre-Scise; so horrid a dungeon that his hair turned white in a few days."

Perils by water would supply many a parallel passage. Captain Marryat is almost unduly moderate when he makes his veteran from the whale fishery say of one voyage, which furious gales and crushing icebergs made exceptionally dangerous, "That was a dreadful voyage, Jacob, and turned one-third of my hair grey." Had the captain had any notion of being or becoming a sensation novelist, the preservation of two-thirds of the old salt's hair in its original colour would never have been possible. But, fiction apart, take an example from stern fact, of what the agony of endurance, in perils of adventure, has been known to effect. Madame Godin's attempt, in 1769, to descend the Amazon to its mouth in an open boat-which Mr. Prescott justly pronounces "an expedition more remarkable than that of Orellana”-involved, in its disastrous sequel, an incidental illustration of our subject. The boat was wrecked, and the crew, eight in number, including Madame and her two brothers, endeavoured to "foot it" the rest of the way; but it was her fate to see her companions perish, one by one, till she was left alone in that desolate region. Though a young woman, it will not be surprising that the hardships and terrors she endured turned her hair perfectly white.”

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Leigh Hunt, in the journal he kept of his stormy and perilous voyage to Italy in the winter of 1821, makes this entry (Dec. 15): "The captain told us to-day how his hair turned white in a shipwreck.”

It was on the day after the Fox had been slowly

boring out under steam for eighteen hours, and twenty-two miles, against a heavy sea of closepacked rolling ice—which more than once stopped the engines by choking the screw-that Captain McClintock wrote in his Arctic journal," After yesterday's experience I can understand how men's hair have turned grey in a few hours." He could understand that such an incident may be something more than a poetical licence when signalised in verse, as in some lines by the late Alexander Smith:

Ye winds! when like a curse ye drove us on,
Frothing the waters, and along our way,

Nor cape, nor headland, through red mornings shone,
One wept aloud, one shuddered down to pray,
One howled, "Upon the Deep we are astray."
On our wild hearts his words fell like a blight:
In one short hour my hair was striken grey,
For all the crew sank ghastly in my sight

As we went driving on through the cold starry night.

Sceptics will, perhaps, never be wanting to hint a fault in the narrative, and hesitate dislike to the marvel; applying a line of Racine's,

Croirai-je qu'une nuit a pu vous ébranler,

to such an extent as that?-There is an essay of Addison's in which the propriety of overshooting long-bowmen with their own bow is discussed; and the essayist illustrates his argument by telling how a company of talkers were discoursing on the effects. of fear; and how upon one of them asserting that

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