elves
so entirely to yourselves.

ZOZIM [_good-naturedly embarrassed_] Look here. There is no good
discussing this. I had rather not explain; but it wont make any
difference to our Colonizers what sort of short-livers they come across.
We shall arrange all that. Never mind how. Let us join the ladies.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_throwing off his diplomatic attitude and
abandoning himself to despair_] We understand you only too well, sir.
Well, kill us. End the lives you have made miserably unhappy by opening
up to us the possibility that any of us may live three hundred years. I
solemnly curse that possibility. To you it may be a blessing, because
you do live three hundred years. To us, who live less than a hundred,
whose flesh is as grass, it is the most unbearable burden our poor
tortured humanity has ever groaned under.

THE ENVOY. Hullo, Poppa! Steady! How do you make that out?

ZOZIM. What is three hundred years? Short enough, if you ask me. Why, in
the old days you people lived on the assumption that you were going to
last out for ever and ever and ever. Immortal, you thought yourselves.
Were you any happier then?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. As President of the Baghdad Historical Society
I am in a position to inform you that the communities which took this
monstrous pretension seriously were the most wretched of which we have
any record. My Society has printed an editio princeps of the works of
the father of history, Thucyderodotus Macolly-buckle. Have you read his
account of what was blasphemously called the Perfect City of God, and
the attempt made to reproduce it in the northern part of these islands
by Jonhobsnoxius, called the Leviathan? Those misguided people
sacrificed the fragment of life that was granted to them to an imaginary
immortality. They crucified the prophet who told them to take no thought
for the morrow, and that here and now was their Australia: Australia
being a term signifying paradise, or an eternity of bliss. They tried
to produce a condition of death in life: to mortify the flesh, as they
called it.

ZOZIM. Well, you are not suffering from that, are you? You have not a
mortified air.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Naturally we are not absolutely insane and
suicidal. Nevertheless we impose on ourselves abstinences and
disciplines and studies that are meant to prepare us for living three
centuries. And we seldom live one. My childhood was made unnecessarily
painful, my boyhood unnecessarily labo