speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that
it matters much to many, to most of us. It does, I know, to me.

SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really
too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my
senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the
secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak
of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who
have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But
I--well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day.
The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints.
To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his
pistol--and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your
soul.

To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog,
that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the
consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For
you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with
him as well. I shall smoulder for years, you will be carried to heaven,
like Enoch, in a beautiful lightning.

'A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What can it know of Death?'

That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.

LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a
hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a
robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live
again, if only to make sure of that _magnum opus_--just to realise
those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?

SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on
his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you,
Lector--such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding
labour-house vast of being.'

But, Lector, you who love work so well--have you never heard tell of
a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my
Lector?--not tired at the end of a busy day, but tired in the morning,
tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on
their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning
sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his
morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you
be always like the children who