s a serious matter?"

"How can I know that? I have never been dead in all my life. I have
heard that death is a serious matter, but never from any of those who
have experienced it."

The general was silent for a moment; the man interested, perhaps amused
him--a type not previously encountered.

"Death," he said, "is at least a loss--a loss of such happiness as we
have, and of opportunities for more."

"A loss of which we shall never be conscious can be borne with composure
and therefore expected without apprehension. You must have observed,
General, that of all the dead men with whom it is your soldierly
pleasure to strew your path none shows signs of regret."

"If the being dead is not a regrettable condition, yet the becoming so--
the act of dying--appears to be distinctly disagreeable to one who has
not lost the power to feel."

"Pain is disagreeable, no doubt. I never suffer it without more or less
discomfort. But he who lives longest is most exposed to it. What you
call dying is simply the last pain--there is really no such thing as
dying. Suppose, for illustration, that I attempt to escape. You lift the
revolver that you are courteously concealing in your lap, and--"

The general blushed like a girl, then laughed softly, disclosing his
brilliant teeth, made a slight inclination of his handsome head and said
nothing. The spy continued: "You fire, and I have in my stomach what I
did not swallow. I fall, but am not dead. After a half-hour of agony I
am dead. But at any given instant of that half-hour I was either alive
or dead. There is no transition period.

"When I am hanged to-morrow morning it will be quite the same; while
conscious I shall be living; when dead, unconscious. Nature appears to
have ordered the matter quite in my interest--the way that I should have
ordered it myself. It is so simple," he added with a smile, "that it
seems hardly worth while to be hanged at all."

At the finish of his remarks there was a long silence. The general sat
impassive, looking into the man's face, but apparently not attentive to
what had been said. It was as if his eyes had mounted guard over the
prisoner while his mind concerned itself with other matters. Presently
he drew a long, deep breath, shuddered, as one awakened from a dreadful
dream, and exclaimed almost inaudibly: "Death is horrible!"--this man of
death.

"It was horrible to our savage ancestors," said the spy, gravely,
"because they had not enough i