The Evening Telegraph

An Artist in Suicide.

Frenchmen who do not believe in a God and drink sugar and water for intellectual stimulation have generally been regarded as unrivalled in the fine and useful art of taking themselves out of the world for no particular cause, but an American has, at last, vindicated the equal art of his countrymen in this line, and killed himself causelessly with great applause. His name was Norris Delaplane, his age was twenty-three, he had a university education, and he shot himself on his boarding-house sofa in Natchitoches. When the landlady flew upstairs to the fatal room to see if the carpet was on fire, she found two or three letters symmetrically arranged on the dressing-table, a best suit carefully laid out for the burial, and the deceased boarder lying like one asleep. One of the letters was addressed to an editor, and said: "I write to request the press of Natchez, through your columns, to allow no writer to attribute my death to any particular cause. The idea of suicide did not originate in Natchez, nor in the sunny South at all; consequently no one here can possibly tell why I kill myself. I doubt whether any individual in the known world can even give a shadow of a cause. In almost every suicide, liquor, love, remorse, or disappointment of some kind is the supposed or actual cause, but in my case none of these causes prevailed. I have seen the world and am weary of it is about the truth." Another letter was to the lady of the boarding-house, politely apologizing to her for the awkward necessity of dying on her sofa, and cheerfully intimating that if the spirits of the departed are permitted to hover around places in which they were particularly well treated in life, a grateful ghost might be expected shortly. In a case like this, speculation at once falls to work in search of some supposable cause. Was the heavy name of Delaplane, for instance, too much a weariness to be longer borne? or did its bearer die by that delusion of having seen a great deal of this world which is so apt to infect persons of the hoary age of twenty-three? At any rate, he died as the Frenchman dieth; and Frenchmen, we all know, frequently commit suicide for the same reason that makes "the stars above" shine so brightly in the ancient ballad of "Molly Bawn"—"because they've nothing else to do."