There must be strange views of the future life among
some of our people. The master of a small vessel was sentenced to death on Wednesday, at Grimsby, for the deliberate murder of his sweetheart. When asked if he had anything to say, he declared that he had killed the girl, and that it was right he should be hung. He asked, however, to be allowed to smoke before execution, for he wished not to break down, but to die an English hero. "He expected to meet the girl in the next world, and if she knew he broke down in this simple affair, she would poke fun at him." The next world to that man's mind must have appeared like a street in Grimsby, in which he would meet his victim; but his debt to the law being paid, the meeting would be cordial and even comic. A total lack of imagination like that is rare ; but we should be startled if we could know the precise thoughts of a hundred people in the Strand about the future life. Probably not five have formed of it any but the most perfectly material conception,—a majority, perhaps, thinking of it as a beautiful tea-garden, with hymns instead of secular music.
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