ch has attended
my efforts."

Novel Notes.

BY JEROME K. JEROME.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HAL HURST AND J. GULICH.

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PART XI.

[Illustration: "LIGHTING HIS PIPE."]

Said Brown one evening, "There is but one vice, and that is selfishness.
Selfishness is the seed of all sin."

Jephson was standing before the fire lighting his pipe. He puffed the
tobacco into a glow, threw the match into the embers, and then said:

"And the seed of all virtue, also. Don't let us forget that."

"Sit down and get on with your work," said MacShaugnassy from the sofa
where he lay at full length with his heels on a chair; "we're discussing
the novel, Paradoxes not admitted during business hours."

Jephson, however, was in an argumentative mood. "Selfishness," he
continued, "is merely another name for Will. Every deed, good or bad,
that we do is prompted by selfishness. We are charitable to secure
ourselves a good place in the next world, to make ourselves respected in
this, to ease our own distress at the knowledge of suffering. One man is
kind because it gives him pleasure to be kind, just as another is cruel
because cruelty pleases him. A great man does his duty because to him
the sense of duty done is a deeper delight than would be the ease
resulting from avoidance of duty. The religious man is religious because
he finds a joy in religion; the moral man moral because with his strong
self-respect, viciousness would mean wretchedness. Self-sacrifice itself
is only a subtle selfishness: we prefer the mental exaltation gained
thereby to the sensual gratification which is the alternative reward.
Man cannot be anything else but selfish. Selfishness is the law of all
life. Each thing, from the farthest fixed star to the smallest insect
crawling on the earth, fighting for itself according to its strength;
and brooding over all, the Eternal, working for _Himself_: that is the
universe."

(Copyrighted 1892 in the United States of America, by Jerome K. Jerome.)

"Have some whiskey," said MacShaugnassy; "and don't be so complicatedly
metaphysical. You make my head ache."

"If all action, good and bad, spring from selfishness," replied Brown;
"then there must be good selfishness and bad selfishness; and your bad
selfishness is my plain selfishness, without any adjective, so we are
back where we started. I say selfishness--bad selfishness--is the root
of all evil, and there you are bound to agree with me."

"Not always