serving of record and worthy of imitation, has been recently made known to the public through the newspapers of the day :— At a meeting of the weekly board of the Gene- ral Hospital at Nottingham, on the 19th May, Mr.

MARTIN PRESTON attended as executor of the late Mr. FREDERICK THE following account of a noble act, de- ATTENBOROUGH with a copy of his will, by which he leaves to the hospital the sum of 4,20(W. Consols. Mr. PRESTON stated that Mr. ATTENBOROUGH had been an in-patient of the hospital some fifty-three years since, and con- sidered that to the skill and kindness there shown him he owed his life; and that to show his gratitude he wished to leave the hospital all the savings of his many years. Mr. ATTENBOROUGH, after leaving the hospital, enlisted in the 3rd Dragoon Guards, and served in that regiment as a private for thirty-three years and six months.

On his discharge he was presented with a service of plate by the officers of the regiment " as a mark of their approbation of his conduct and character." Since his discharge he has been living a retired life in Nottingham, with a pen- sion of Is. 4 i. a day. The whole of his munifi- cent legacy to the hospital has been accumulated by careful saving during a period of fifty-three years.

Gratitude has been satirically defined as "a grateful sense of favours to come." Now, assuredly the gratitude of Mr.

FREDERICK ATTENBOROUGH, late a private soldier in the British army, and fifty-three years ago an inmate of the General Hospital at Nottingham, was not of this order; see- ing that ere his gift was made known he had passed away, beyond the reach of all human favour and human praise. So like- wise to this last act of the old soldier, the sarcasm which has been often bestowed on the bequests of the rich—that they only give away their wealth when they can no longer spend it on themselves—would be unjustly applied. For if the largeness of the amount, compared with the rank and position of the donor, be taken into considera- tion, it is evident that this was not a gift of that which was of no further use to the giver ; but that for a long series of years, unmindful of the many comforts and little luxuries which help to enliven and make agreeable our sojourn on earth, this good man, day by day, and year by year, denied himself all such superfluities, as he pro- bably deemed them, with the settled pur- pose ever -before him of repaying a debt of gratitude in the noble form of conveying, in perpetuity, to other suffering men, the benefits that he had himself received.

All honour, then, to FREDERICK ATTEN- BOROUGH, of the 3rd Dragoon Guards, and may each and all of us who read of his noble self-denial and single-hearted gene- rosity so cherish in our own minds a sense of gratitude for all benefits that are conferred on ourselves, first to God, who is the giver of all good, and next, to all our human, bene- factors, that our hearts may be warmed by the same desise to benefit others, and that, in accordance with our means and capabili- ties, our gratitude may bear fruit as practical as his.

We have, however, as implied in our heading, a special object in view in intro- ducing Mr. ATTENBOROUGH'S bequest to the notice of our seamen readers—we present it as a hint to themselves. Let them not smile at the idea. We are not going to invite them, one and all, to lead a life of self-denial to the end of their days, and each to leave 4,20(M. to a hospital or other charity. We admit, to a certain ex- tent, that " charity begins at home," that God's gifts are granted to us to be enjoyed, and that wives and children, and parents, and near relatives, have the first claim on us all. We likewise desire to do justice to the thousands of our seamen who kindly and dutifully remit a large proportion of their hard-earned wages to " those they have left behind them." We know, especially, how many a British mother receives substantial aid from her sailor son, helping her, perchance, to clothe and feed, and educate a youthful family, or in her old age providing her with decent clothes and a warm bed; and more than this, enabling her. to enjoy the priceless happiness of knowing that he whom she has borne is gratefully mindful of all she has undergone for him. We rejoice to know this, and we would not for the world divert one penny of a sailor's earnings from so sacred a use.

Neither indeed would we ask a seaman, dying in a foreign clime, who had aught to leave behind him, to leave the same to a charitable purpose, if he had relatives living who had any claim whatever upon him. As, however, it is a well-known fact that a large sum, amounting to many hundreds of pounds, the property of seamen dying at sea without known relatives, is annually paid into the Mercantile Marine Fund, we think it may not be amiss to remind our sailors, even in the interest of their own relatives,—1st, That in the event of their being aware of approaching death, it is suffi- cient, to be legally binding, for them to make a simple written declaration, in the presence of two credible witnesses, as to the manner in which they wish any property they possess to be bestowed. And 2ndly, to suggest to them, if they have no relatives known to them, that they could not do better than follow the example of the old soldier, and leave their property, however small, to one of the great charities instituted for the benefit of their class. They need be at no loss to find such, for there are probably but a small proportion of their number who have not at some period of their lives received direct assistance themselves from one or another of the four great insti- tutions which have been founded for their benefit, or who have not had shipmates and friends that have done so. At the head of these bodies stands the NATIONAL LIFE- BOAT INSTITUTION, which has rendered to many thousand merchant seamen the greatest human benefit that can be con- conferred on man—the preservation of his life. Does not every individual of that great company of saved men owe as large a debt of gratitude to the society which has I rescued him from the very jaws of death as FREDERICK ATTENBOROUGH owed to the Nottingham Hospital ? So, again, the " Dreadnought Hospital" ship, in the Port of London, has rendered to very many thousands of afflicted seamen precisely the same service as that which warmed the faithful soldier's heart with grateful recollections that only ended with his life.

Again, how large a number of seamen, who have lost their all by shipwreck and found themselves penniless on the strand, have been fed and clothed, and sent free of expense to their homes, or to any seaport they may have selected, by the " Ship- wrecked Fishermen and Mariners' Society?" And, lastly, there are the Sailors' Homes, which at all our chief ports now offer a comfortable and respectable abode to the sailor ashore, and afford him a secure refuge from the army of scoundrels who, combining together for his destruction, and looking on him as their natural prey, dog his every footstep, and await him at every corner, from the moment of his landing on his native shore till he embarks again. Have not, we repeat, each and all of these ad- mirable institutions the same claim to the gratitude of our sea-faring men that the Nottingham Hospital had on the hero of our story?