rolling that
stone year after year and seeing it roll down again unless he liked
seeing it? We are not told that there was a dragon which attacked him
whenever he tried to shirk. If he had greatly cared about getting his
load over the last pinch, experience would have shown him some way of
doing so. The probability is that he got to enjoy the downward rush of
his stone, and very likely amused himself by so timing it as to cause the
greatest scare to the greatest number of the shades that were below.

What though Tantalus found the water shun him and the fruits fly from him
when he tried to seize them? The writer of the "Odyssey" gives us no
hint that he was dying of thirst or hunger. The pores of his skin would
absorb enough water to prevent the first, and we may be sure that he got
fruit enough, one way or another, to keep him going.

Tityus, as an effort after the conception of an eternity of torture, is
not successful. What could an eagle matter on the liver of a man whose
body covered nine acres? Before long he would find it an agreeable
stimulant. If, then, the greatest minds of antiquity could invent
nothing that should carry better conviction of eternal torture, is it
likely that the conviction can be carried at all?

Methought I saw Jove sitting on the topmost ridges of Olympus and
confessing failure to Minerva. "I see, my dear," he said, "that there is
no use in trying to make people very happy or very miserable for long
together. Pain, if it does not soon kill, consists not so much in
present suffering as in the still recent memory of a time when there was
less, and in the fear that there will soon be more; and so happiness lies
less in immediate pleasure than in lively recollection of a worse time
and lively hope of better."

As for the young gentleman above referred to, my father met him with the
assurance that there had been several cases in which living people had
been caught up into heaven or carried down into hell, and been allowed to
return to earth and report what they had seen; while to others visions
had been vouchsafed so clearly that thousands of authentic pictures had
been painted of both states. All incentive to good conduct, he had then
alleged, was found to be at once removed from those who doubted the
fidelity of these pictures.

This at least was what he had then said, but I hardly think he would have
said it at the time of which I am now writing. As he continued to sit in
t