A GREAT MAN: -We felt very much like going into mourning, and did, indeed, spatter the margin of the book with a pen full of ink, as we laid down the third volume of Wilkes's Exploring expeditions, struck with the record of the death of Patrick Connell.
Poor Patrick-or, as he was called for shortness, Paddy. It is a pleasant way the world has of signifying its affection for a man, by smoothing his name-of shaking out the wrinkles- of softening down the final consonants into delicate vowels. Subtending the angles of some three syllabled appellative with a single sounded hypotenuse.
Captain Wilkes, on arriving at one of the farthest and most undesirable of the Fejee Islands, where pig's flesh is a luxury, and human flesh a high holiday food, had a visit from a host of the oil-bedaubed and clay-covered inhabitants, whom he addressed through an interpreter, and whose wants, in the way of jackknives, beads and glass bottles, he supplied.
With a modesty acquired, of course, among the cannibals, one inhabitant gently pressed aside the interpreter, and, to the question of what he wanted replied, that "his honor should give him a hatchet for the children."
Great was the astonishment of the captain to ascertain that beneath the bushy head and oiled skin before him beat the heart of an Irishman, who, to the question of what he was doing there, replied, "raising pigs, hens and children."
The pigs and the hens did not multiply rapidly, but Patrick was the happy father of "Forty-Eight Children," and was living with the hopes of two more that very year.
But, alas, the hopes of this Priam of the Fejees were blasted-not in the failure of his plans, but in the termination of his life. He died in a few months afterwards, "leaving a large circle of wives and children to deplore their irreparable loss. [Phil. U.S. Gaz.]
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