isdom returned with me.

"Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on the
labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity and
vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

"All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous
and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the
good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
oath.

"This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that
there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men
is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and
after that they go to the dead.

"For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a
living dog is better than a dead lion.

"For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not
anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them
is forgotten.

"Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;
neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is
done under the sun."

"There you have it, Hump," he said, closing the book upon his finger and
looking up at me. "The Preacher who was king over Israel in Jerusalem
thought as I think. You call me a pessimist. Is not this pessimism of
the blackest?--'All is vanity and vexation of spirit,' 'There is no
profit under the sun,' 'There is one event unto all,' to the fool and the
wise, the clean and the unclean, the sinner and the saint, and that event
is death, and an evil thing, he says. For the Preacher loved life, and
did not want to die, saying, 'For a living dog is better than a dead
lion.' He preferred the vanity and vexation to the silence and
unmovableness of the grave. And so I. To crawl is piggish; but to not
crawl, to be as the clod and rock, is loathsome to contemplate. It is
loathsome to the life that is in me, the very essence of which is
movement, the power of movement, and the consciousness of the power of
movement. Life itself is unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is
greater unsatisfaction."

"You are worse off than Omar," I said. "He, at least, after the
customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his materialism a
joyous thing."

"Who was Omar?" Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more wo