er ourselves;
and even then we should be more easy in our minds if we could arrange to
sit on her grave for a week or so afterward. These women are so artful!

But it is not only the adventuress who will persist in coming to life
again every time she is slaughtered. They all do it on the stage. They
are all so unreliable in this respect. It must be most disheartening to
the murderers.

And then, again, it is something extraordinary, when you come to think
of it, what a tremendous amount of killing some of them can stand and
still come up smiling in the next act, not a penny the worse for it.
They get stabbed, and shot, and thrown over precipices thousands of feet
high and, bless you, it does them good--it is like a tonic to them.

As for the young man that is coming home to see his girl, you simply
can't kill him. Achilles was a summer rose compared with him. Nature and
mankind have not sufficient materials in hand as yet to kill that
man. Science has but the strength of a puling babe against his
invulnerability. You can waste your time on earthquakes and shipwrecks,
volcanic eruptions, floods, explosions, railway accidents, and such like
sort of things, if you are foolish enough to do so; but it is no good
your imagining that anything of the kind can hurt him, because it can't.

There will be thousands of people killed, thousands in each instance,
but one human being will always escape, and that one human being will be
the stage young man who is coming home to see his girl.

He is forever being reported as dead, but it always turns out to be
another fellow who was like him or who had on his (the young man's) hat.
He is bound to be out of it, whoever else may be in.

"If I had been at my post that day," he explains to his sobbing mother,
"I should have been blown up, but the Providence that watches over good
men had ordained that I should be laying blind drunk in Blogg's saloon
at the time the explosion took place, and so the other engineer, who had
been doing my work when it was his turn to be off, was killed along with
the whole of the crew."

"Ah, thank Heaven, thank Heaven for that!" ejaculates the pious old
lady, and the comic man is so overcome with devout joy that he has to
relieve his overstrained heart by drawing his young woman on one side
and grossly insulting her.

All attempts to kill this young man ought really to be given up now. The
job has been tried over and over again by villains and bad peopl