CHAPTER CXLI.

A SINGULAR ANECDOTE AND NOT MORE SAD THAN TRUE.

Oh penny Pipers, and most painful penners
Of bountiful new Ballads, what a subject,
What a sweet subject for your silver sounds!
                                           BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.

The chance of the Birmingham halfpenny was a rare one. I will not so far wrong the gentle Reader as to suppose that he will doubt the accuracy of any thing which is recorded in this true history; and I seriously assure him that such a halfpenny I have myself seen in those days when the most barefaced counterfeits were in full circulation,—a halfpenny which had a head on either side, and consequently was like the fox in the fable, or a certain noble Marquis, and now more noble Duke when embassador at Petersburg,—not as being double-faced, but as having lost its tail.

A rare chance it was, and yet rarer ones have happened.—I remember one concerning a more serious appeal to fortune with the same instrument. An Organist not without some celebrity in his day, (Jeremiah Clark was his name), being hopelessly in love with a very beautiful lady, far above his station in life, determined upon suicide, and walked into the fields to accomplish his purpose. Coming to a retired spot where there was a convenient pond, surrounded with equally convenient trees, he hesitated which to prefer, whether to choose a dry death, or a watery one;—perhaps he had never heard of the old riddle concerning Ælia Lælia Crispis, which no Œdipus has yet solved. But that he might not continue like the Ass between two bundles of hay in the sophism, or Mahomet's coffin in the fable, he tossed a halfpenny in the air to decide whether he should hang or drown himself,—and the halfpenny stuck edgeways in the dirt.

The most determined infidel would at such a moment have felt that this was more than accident. Clark, as may well be supposed went home again; but the salutary impression did not remain upon his poor disordered mind, and he shot himself soon afterwards.