Gordon, the Slave Trader.—The life and melancholy end of this man who was cut off by the hand of the executioner, in the flower of his manhood, contains some very important and suggestive lessons to both children and parents. He was taken in the commission of a crime which the laws of nations hold as piracy; he was tried, found guilty, condemned, and after every device had been exhausted which legal skill and learning, on the part of his counsel, could invent, was executed on the 21st of February last. He was thirty-five years of age, at the time of his execution; was a husband and a father; and has left a heritage of sorrow to his wife and of shame to his child. At the age of fifteen—that age full of peril to the young; when they stand, as it were, at the forks of two great highways of life, one of which leads up and the other down; when the boy and girl are beginning to chafe under the wholesome restraint of home, and think that they know as much, and can judge as well for themselves as their parents can—at this age young Gordon was seized with a desire to go to sea, against the wishes of his parents. “But the boy”—such is the narrative, “already the ruler of the domestic circle, was determined, and to sea he went.” What a page does this one sentence open, of this young man’s early history; and what an ill-omened prophecy was it of his subsequent career of crime, and of his fearful and untimely end! This is the first lesson which his life teaches—the fruits of early disobedience. This was the beginning of a life which ended on the gallows. Parent and child were both no doubt guilty in this, and how terrible the penalty which both have brought upon themselves!