the normal curvature of
cats' claws can surely spare from his wisdom a few rays of philosophy to
cheer an old man's gloom. Pray tell me what I shall do to assuage my
grief."

The reader can, perhaps, faintly conceive my astonishment when
Gnarmag-Zote gravely replied: "Kill yourself."

"Surely," I cried, "you would not have this honest fellow procure oblivion
(since you think that death is nothing else) by so rash an act!"

"An act that Gnarmag-Zote advises," he said, coldly, "is not rash."

"But death," I said, "death, whatever else it may be, is an end of life.
This old man is now in sorrow almost insupportable. But a few days and it
will be supportable; a few months and it will have become no more than a
tender melancholy. At last it will disappear, and in the society of his
friends, in the skill of his cook, the profits of avarice, the study of
how to be querulous and in the pursuit of loquacity, he will again
experience the joys of age. Why for a present grief should he deprive
himself of all future happiness?"

Gnarmag-Zote looked upon me with something like compassion. "My friend,"
said he, "guest of my sovereign and my country, know that in any
circumstances, even those upon which true happiness is based and
conditioned, death is preferable to life. The sum of miseries in any life
(here in Lalugnan at least) exceeds the sum of pleasures; but suppose that
it did not. Imagine an existence in which happiness, of whatever
intensity, is the rule, and discomfort, of whatever moderation, the
exception. Still there is some discomfort. There is none in death, for (as
it is given to us to know) that is oblivion, annihilation. True, by dying
one loses his happiness as well as his sorrows, but he is not conscious of
the loss. Surely, a loss of which one will never know, and which, if it
operate to make him less happy, at the same time takes from him the desire
and capacity and need of happiness, cannot be an evil. That is so
intelligently understood among us here in Lalugnan that suicide is common,
and our word for sufferer is the same as that for fool. If this good man
had not been an idiot he would have taken his life as soon as he was
bereaved."

"If what you say of the blessing of death is true," I said, smilingly, for
I greatly prided myself on the ingenuity of my thought, "it is unnecessary
to commit suicide through grief for the dead; for the more you love the
more glad you should be that the object of your affe