hate to be sent to bed, and think that
when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few
years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May
it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by
a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so
short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins
to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort
croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or
romance can overcome--don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to
seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would
fall'?

LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scriptor. You say my health, my
youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your
ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?

SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my
particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been
supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most
general among men. Was it not old age?--which, like youth, is
independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old
in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the
desire of rest.

LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling
fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its
imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain
hours of its youth over again?--and would the old man not give all he
possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?

SCRIPTOR. He would give everything--but the certainty of rest. After
seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us
in. Besides, age may not be so sure of the advantages of youth. All is
not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are
uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its
passions, but age has its comforts.

LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice
betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have
you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you?
Have you looked on death face to face?

SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have--but once. It is now about five years
ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the
memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a