The Regent's Park catastrophe seems to have been a sort
of signal for persons who Were not, but might have been, drowned, to abscond. In at least eight or nine cases there have been dis- appearances by persons either benevolently anxious to give their relatives the temporary pleasure of thinking them no more, or cruelly bent on giving them the pain of a needless suspense, or actuated by -more fanciful motives, some of which we have discussed elsewhere. The remarkable unanimity with which,—of course without concert, --so many persons unknown to each other out of a comparatively small group seized simultaneously on the idea that it would be -an advantage to be supposed dead, suggests a terrible sort of suspicion as to the worth of a considerable number of family ties. When the eight gentlemen, each of whom had refused the last peach on the plate, _found, when the lamp went out, their eight hands meeting accidentally on the peach, there was a certain humour in the transaction which prepared them for a hearty laugh when, on the rekindling of the lamp, the peach was found still unappropriated. But if the eight gentlemen who grasped simultaneously, by a like strange coincidence, at the opportunity of being supposed dead by their friends, could meet and have a sudden light thrown on their motives, we suspect that, with an exception or two perhaps, they would not, on the whole, feel proud of their new acquaintances, or of the magnetic sympathy between them.
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