a sentence to the end; and after about
two hundred years, they could not hold conversation with their
neighbours, the mortals, because the language of the country was always
upon the flux.

It is a pity that the laws of Laputa stringently forbade the export of
Struldbrugs, else, Gulliver tells us, he would gladly have brought a
couple to this country, to arm our people against the fear of death.
Had he only done so, what a lot of letters to the _Times_,
advertisements of patent medicines; and Eugenic discussions we should
have been spared! If earthly immortality were known to be such a curse,
we could more easily convince the most scrupulous devotee of health that
old age was little better than immortality.

It is not, therefore, as though great age were such a catch that it
should demand all these delicate manipulations of diet, sleep,
rest-cures, health-resorts, scourings, and temperatures, for its
attainment. How refreshing to escape from this hospital atmosphere into
the free air, blowing whither it lists, and to fling oneself carelessly
upon existence, as Sir George Birdwood, for instance, has done! He also
wrote to the _Times_, but in a very different tone. Like another
Gulliver, he pictured the calamity of millionaires living on till their
heirs are senile. It is all nonsense, he said, to prescribe rules for
life. One of his oldest friends drank a bottle of cognac a day, and, as
for himself--well, we know that he is eighty, has lived a varied and
dangerous life in many lands, has written on carrots, chestnuts,
carpets, art, scholarship, all manner of absorbing subjects, and yet he
heartily survives:

"I attribute my senility--let others say senectitude," he
shouts in his cheery way, "to a certain playful devilry of spirit,
a ceaseless militancy, quite suffragettic, so that when I left the
Indian Office on a bilked pension I swore by all the gods I
would make up for it by living on ten years, instead of one,
which was all an insurance society told me I was worth."

That sounds the true note, blowing the horn of old forests and battles.
"A playful devilry of spirit," "a ceaseless militancy"--how stirring to
the stagnant lives of prudent regularity! "Lie in bed till noon-day!"
he goes on; "I would rather be some monstrous flat-fish at the bottom of
the Atlantic than accept human life on such terms." Who in future will
hear of rest-cures, retirements, retreats, nursings, comforts, and
attention to h