Fair Play

One of the Most Remarkable Cases of Suicide on Record.

The Hartford (Conn.) Times says:

Further facts in regard to the death by suicide of young Donald Watson shows that the cause of the act was probably some phase of physical and mental derangement, caused, his father thinks, by too much study of the works of Darwin, Huxley, Herbert Spencer and Tyndall.

The deceased was only twenty years of age. Two years ago he was graduated at the head of his class, from the Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and about that time was confirmed in St. John's Church, East Hartford. He was a thorough botanist, and was only recently offered the place of tutor in Bussey's Institute, at Jamaica Plains, near Boston.

During the past winter he taught a school of forty-seven pupils at South Manchester, where it is said he was much liked. He was reticent, and there seems to have been little of the unrestrained confidence between him and his father which should exist between a parent and son.

Last spring he went to New Haven to see the election parade, having first drawn $350 from a bank in this city, without the knowledge of his parents. He went not only to New Haven, but to New York, and sailed from New York to Europe, where he remained three months. A letter which he had written to his parents at this time, never reached them, and they were greatly worried at his unaccountable absence. He re-appeared in fine health and spirits at his father's house.

He suffered much from dyspepsia, and, of late, on this account, became moody and melancholy. He was an only son, but had three sisters. His suicide, take it all and all, was the most extraordinary act of cool and deliberate self destruction that was ever carried out in this region, if not in the country; and it rivals, in its cool and orderly method, the most remarkable suicide recorded in Paris, that city from which he obtained his terrible examples and means resorted to.

The cool manner in which he went about it—first ordering a tinman's furnace to be made, then buying a pair of bellows and a quantity of charcoal—then hiring a room at a boarding-house: locking and nailing himself in, nicely stopping up the chimney, with a towel over the grate and fire-place, the placing of the furnace on a wash-bowl, with a wet towel beneath it to prevent the room from taking fire, and then coolly lying down on the bed to await death—all these things bespeak a deliberate purpose and unflinching will that challenge wonder.