hes down between the stems of
mountain-ash, this from beneath the vast ancestral elm below the
palace, this from the sea-shore. Marvellous! And I am eager to
descend again; I have not explored the cliff which breaks the
descent of the torrent, nor the thicket in the gully. There must
be marchantia under the spray of the one, and possibly dittany in
the peat of the other.

PALLAS.

We must not detain you, Aesculapius. But tell us how you propose
to adapt yourself to our new life. It seems to me that you are
determined not to find it irksome.

AESCULAPIUS.

Does it not occur to you, Pallas, that--although I should never
have had the courage to adopt it--thus forced upon us it offers
me the most dazzling anticipations? Hitherto my existence has been
all theory. What there is to know about the principles of health as
applied to the fluctuations of mortality, I may suppose is known to
me. You might be troubled, Pallas, with every conceivable malady,
from elephantiasis to earache, and I should be in a position to
analyse and to deal with each in turn. You might be obscured by
ophthalmia, crippled by gout or consumed to a spectre by phthisis,
and I should be able, without haste, without anxiety, to unravel
the coil, to reduce the nodosities, to make the fleshy instrument
respond in melody to all your needs.

PALLAS.

But you have never done this. We knew that you _could_ do it, and
that has been enough for us.

AESCULAPIUS.

It has never been enough for me. The impenetrable immortality of
all our bodies has been a constant source of exasperation to me.

PALLAS.

Is it not much to know?

AESCULAPIUS.

Yes; but it is more to _do_. The most perfect theory carries a
monotony and an emptiness about with it, if it is never renovated
by practice. In Olympus the unbroken health of all the inmates,
which we have accepted as a matter of course, has been more
advantageous to them than it has been to me.

PALLAS.

I quite see that it has made your position a more academic one than
you could wish.

AESCULAPIUS.

It has made it purely academic, and indeed, Pallas, if you will
reflect upon it, the very existence of a physician in a social
system which is eternally protected against every species of bodily
disturbance borders upon the ridiculous.

PALLAS.

It would interest me to know whether in our old home you were
conscious of this incongruity, of this lack of harmony between your
science and your occasions of