n the table near him. His breakfast.
He lives on a diet of raw carrots and a little milk now."

"How does he look on it?" asked Comrade Ossipon listlessly.

"Angelic. . . . I picked up a handful of his pages from the floor. The
poverty of reasoning is astonishing. He has no logic. He can't think
consecutively. But that's nothing. He has divided his biography into
three parts, entitled--'Faith, Hope, Charity.' He is elaborating now the
idea of a world planned out like an immense and nice hospital, with
gardens and flowers, in which the strong are to devote themselves to the
nursing of the weak."

The Professor paused.

"Conceive you this folly, Ossipon? The weak! The source of all evil on
this earth!" he continued with his grim assurance. "I told him that I
dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand
for utter extermination."

"Do you understand, Ossipon? The source of all evil! They are our
sinister masters--the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the
faint of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the
multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate,
exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me,
Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only
relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and the
dumb, then the halt and the lame--and so on. Every taint, every vice,
every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom."

"And what remains?" asked Ossipon in a stifled voice.

"I remain--if I am strong enough," asserted the sallow little Professor,
whose large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far out from the
sides of his frail skull, took on suddenly a deep red tint.

"Haven't I suffered enough from this oppression of the weak?" he
continued forcibly. Then tapping the breast-pocket of his jacket: "And
yet _I am_ the force," he went on. "But the time! The time! Give me
time! Ah! that multitude, too stupid to feel either pity or fear.
Sometimes I think they have everything on their side. Everything--even
death--my own weapon."

"Come and drink some beer with me at the Silenus," said the robust
Ossipon after an interval of silence pervaded by the rapid flap, flap of
the slippers on the feet of the Perfect Anarchist. This last accepted.
He was jovial that day in his own peculiar way. He slapped Ossipon's
shoulder.

"Beer! So be it! Let us drink and he merry, f