SOME SINGULAR DELUSIONS.

Waikato Times, Volume XIX, Issue 1608, 24 October 1882, Page 4

SOME SINGULAR DELUSIONS.

In Hey wood's History of Angih we find the following strange story : "A young hypochondriac had a strong imagination th.ifc he was dead, and did not only abstain from meat and drink, but importuned his parents that he might be carried to his grave and buried before his ilesh was quite putniied. By the counsel of physicians lie was wrapped in a winding sheet, laid upon a bier, and so cariied on men's shoulders towards the church. On the way two or three pleasant fellow s, hired for the purpose, meeting the procession, demanded whose body it was. Being told who it was, ' Surely,' replied one, ' the world is well rid of him ; he ■was a man of very bad and vicious life, and his friends have cause to rejoice that he has ended his days thus, rather than at the gallows !' Thereupon the dead man rose on his bier, and told them they were wicked men to do him that wrong, and if he were alive again he would teach them to speak better of the dead. But they proceeding to defame him, and to give him much more disgraceful, contemptuous language, he not able to suffer it, leaped from the bier, and fell about their ears with such rage and fury that lie ceased not buffeting them until quite wearied, and by the violent agitation of the humors, his body being altered, he returned to his right mind ; and being brought home and refreshed with wholesome diet, within a few days recovered both his health and his understanding. In Hone's Year Book we read of a farmer at Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, who died in 1721, but was not buried till 1751, thirty years afterwards. This delay in, the interment arose from a singular delusion under which the farmer in the latter years of his life had labored. In making his will he bequeathed his estate worth £400 a year, to his two brothers, and, if they should die, to his nephew, to be enjoyed by them for thirty years, at the expiration of which time he expected to return to life, when the estate was to revert to him. He ordered, therefore, that after his death, and with a view to his re-appearance at the end of thirty years, lias coffin should not be put in the earth, but affixed on a beam in his barn, locked, and the key dropping through a hole in his coffin, that he might unlock it from the inside and let himself out. He was allowed four days' grace beyond the time limited, and still refusing to present himself, his remains were committed to mother earth. Not very long since there died in Paris a man named Yiory, notiblcfor stopping and talking to evciy dog he met in the street ; not out of an irrepressible affection for the fiicnd of man, but as an act of condescension towards a subject. ISane enough to all appeal ances, Viory claimed to be theinonaich of the canine race, by reason of having been a dog himself in a former state of existence. — Reversing the pioccss of transformation a patient in an Ameiican lunatic asylum insisted upon it that he had been changed into a hoise, made himself a tail out ot the frayed ends of a rope, donned harness, and attached himself to a waggon made out of an old soap box, and bu&ied himself in dragging it about all day. He then carefully locked it up with the caits of the establishment at night, and galloped off to a field ; like a steed of high mettle, he never passed a wheelbarrow without .shying at it. — A still more extiaordmary freak of the imagination was displayed by a Frenchman, mad for the loss of his beloved wife. He was found standing in a large flower pot, int°nt upon lefieshing himself with the contents of a watering pot, and informed his astonished friends that his wife had carried aw ay a portion of his soul, leaving him only sufficient for a plant ;he had consequently been transfoimcd into a cypress, as they saw ; and all he had to ask them was to lose no time in transplanting him in the cemetery grounds. In a case tried at Chicago, it was shown that Love, of that city, was under the belief that Queen Victoria, with the Emperor Napoleon and his consoit Eugenie, visited Chicago after the groat fire there, and took up their quarters at the board-ing-house in w Inch Love was living. Seeing the Quucn of England daily, he grew to adore her ; and she in return worshipped him. Mi Di&iacli favoied the match, and the English people appioved it. But.J C. Ktiitkeibocker also fell in love with the august lady, and so managed matters that Mr Love was debarred her presence. Nay, more. When Mr Love went for a mauiagu license, the clerk on seeing the lady concerned was "Victoria (-hielph, Queen of England," refused to grant him the license ; and before long Mr Love had to appear in Court to indicate his competency to manage his affairs. The ill-used mau drew a touching lecture of his devotion to the Queen, and of her unaltered affection for him. He averred that his diabolical foes had drugged Ins lady-love : and that a third candidate for her hand named Cassel had even threatened her life with a hatchet, but failed to shake her lesolution. He had appealed to the British people to rescue their &o\eieigu ; but they had unaccountably made no sign ; and he imploied the Court to subpwua the object of his affections, who had, oingulaily enough, neglected to appear and corroborate his story. An American engine-driver applied for a three months' "lay-off," on the plea that lie was " killing too many men on his run," accusing himself of a wholesale manslaughter, of which he was quite guiltless. For some occult reason, American engine-drivers would seem to be subject to dangeious hallucinations. One had to be relegated to other duties because he was constantly stopping his train for non-existent obstructions on the track, or pulling up in the belief that very palpable bridges had gone altogether. Anoiher was always on the look-out for a black horse, which he averred was in a nightly habit of jumping on the line just ahead of him in a race of several miles ; and when, in his anxiety to overtake the phantom steed, he ran through a stopping station at the rate of fifty miles an hour, it was thought desirable to give him a rest.— No masterless horses troubled the eye and mind of an old driver on the Central Illinois Railway ; his phantom took the shape of an Indian warrior on a white horse, careering along the wide prairie beside the track, and racing with the train unheedful of the fireman's lumps of coal, and the shots from the levolver of the imaginative driver.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science has decided to meet at Southport, England, in 1883, and Montreal, Canada, in ISB4. The Indian Office denies the prevaJence of Asiatic cholera at Aden ; and „' that,epidemic cholera exists in India. -. , Theke have been two severe shocks of ; , earthquake on the Isthmus of Panama on It- 1 - September Bth and 9th. Half the popu- |§< las|on ; of the'eity for nights subsequent, ip|Blegjy# or walked about the plaza, and Pgjjjansyfaropies camped on the plains. Pfe "i^Si»^e?6 !" yelled the farmer to the 0 ua( * ivi us * re(^ " I *° a fl oo^ |P^f»a^^^B^?. pond down back of the l6^ffiffi^MlljiQ«e iire not wild duftks. Those M»ompsli#ucks, sir." " Can't help are ; " answered the city ra^a^piM*; r^Joading ; "they're just! exactly.»-Ex-