o began to look about him wonderingly, curious to see what
the country of Perpetual Life was like. He walked first round about
the country and then through the town. Everything was, of course,
quite strange, and different from his own land. But both the land and
the people seemed prosperous, so he decided that it would be good for
him to stay there and took up lodgings at one of the hotels.

The proprietor was a kind man, and when Sentaro told him that he was a
stranger and had come to live there, he promised to arrange everything
that was necessary with the governor of the city concerning Sentaro's
sojourn there. He even found a house for his guest, and in this way
Sentaro obtained his great wish and became a resident in the country
of Perpetual Life.

Within the memory of all the islanders no man had ever died there,
and sickness was a thing unknown. Priests had come over from India
and China and told them of a beautiful country called Paradise, where
happiness and bliss and contentment fill all men's hearts, but its
gates could only be reached by dying. This tradition was handed down
for ages from generation to generation--but none knew exactly what
death was except that it led to Paradise.

Quite unlike Sentaro and other ordinary people, instead of having a
great dread of death, they all, both rich and poor, longed for it as
something good and desirable. They were all tired of their long,
long lives, and longed to go to the happy land of contentment called
Paradise of which the priests had told them centuries ago.

All this Sentaro soon found out by talking to the islanders. He found
himself, according to his ideas, in the land of _Topsy-turvydom_.
Everything was upside down. He had wished to escape from dying. He had
come to the land of Perpetual Life with great relief and joy, only
to find that the inhabitants themselves, doomed never to die, would
consider it bliss to find death.

What he had hitherto considered poison these people ate as good
food, and all the things to which he had been accustomed as food they
rejected. Whenever any merchants from other countries arrived, the
rich people rushed to them eager to buy poisons. These they swallowed
eagerly hoping for death to come so that they might go to Paradise.

But what were deadly poisons in other lands were without effect in
this strange place, and people who swallowed them with the hope of
dying, only found that in a short time they felt better in hea