d then another million years, and then another
million years after that. There will never be any end to it."

I can remember to this day the agony of those nights, when I would lie
awake, thinking of this endless heaven, from which there seemed to be
no possible escape. For the other place was equally eternal, or I might
have been tempted to seek refuge there.

We grown-up folk, our brains dulled by the slowly acquired habit of
not thinking, do wrong to torture children with these awful themes.
Eternity, Heaven, Hell are meaningless words to us. We repeat them, as
we gabble our prayers, telling our smug, self-satisfied selves that we
are miserable sinners. But to the child, the "intelligent stranger" in
the land, seeking to know, they are fearful realities. If you doubt me,
Reader, stand by yourself, beneath the stars, one night, and SOLVE this
thought, Eternity. Your next address shall be the County Lunatic Asylum.

My actively inclined French friend held cheerier views than are common
of man's life beyond the grave. His belief was that we were destined to
constant change, to everlasting work. We were to pass through the older
planets, to labour in the greater suns.

But for such advanced career a more capable being was needed. No one of
us was sufficient, he argued, to be granted a future existence all to
himself. His idea was that two or three or four of us, according to
our intrinsic value, would be combined to make a new and more important
individuality, fitted for a higher existence. Man, he pointed out, was
already a collection of the beasts. "You and I," he would say, tapping
first my chest and then his own, "we have them all here--the ape, the
tiger, the pig, the motherly hen, the gamecock, the good ant; we are
all, rolled into one. So the man of the future, he will be made up of
many men--the courage of one, the wisdom of another, the kindliness of a
third."

"Take a City man," he would continue, "say the Lord Mayor; add to him a
poet, say Swinburne; mix them with a religious enthusiast, say General
Booth. There you will have the man fit for the higher life."

Garibaldi and Bismarck, he held, should make a very fine mixture,
correcting one another; if needful, extract of Ibsen might be added, as
seasoning. He thought that Irish politicians would mix admirably with
Scotch divines; that Oxford Dons would go well with lady novelists. He
was convinced that Count Tolstoi, a few Gaiety Johnnies (we called them