not pertinent; but he was fully convinced, and he said to me:
'Personally, I would rather not live again, but it seems that people do.
The facts are too many; the proofs I have had are irresistible; and I
have had to give way to them in spite of my wish to reject them.'"

"Yes," the first speaker said, "that is certainly an uncommon
experience. You think that if I were perfectly honest, I should envy him
his experience? Well, then, honestly, I don't."

"No," the other rejoined, "I don't know that I accuse your sincerity.
But, may I ask, what are your personal objections to immortality?"

"It wouldn't be easy to say. If I could have had my way, I would not
have been at all. Speaking selfishly, as we always do when we speak
truly, I have not had a great deal of happiness, though I have had a
good deal of fun. But things seem to wear out. I like to laugh, and I
have laughed, in my time, consumedly. But I find that the laugh goes out
of the specific instances of laughability, just as grieving goes out of
grief. The thing that at the first and third time amused me enormously
leaves me sad at the fourth, or at least unmoved. You see, I can't trust
immortality to be permanently interesting. The reasonable chances are
that in the lapse of a few aeons I should find eternity hanging heavy on
my hands. But it isn't that, exactly, and it would be hard to say what
my objection to immortality exactly is. It would be simpler to say what
it _really_ is. It is personal, temperamental, congenital. I was born, I
suspect, an indifferentist, as far as this life is concerned, and as to
another life, I have an acquired antipathy."

"That is curious, but not incredible, and of course not inconceivable,"
the closest listener assented.

"I'm not so sure of that," a light skirmisher broke his silence for the
first time. "Do you mean to say," he asked of the first speaker, "that
you would not mind being found dead in your bed to-morrow morning, and
that you would rather like it if that were actually the end of you?"

The first speaker nodded his head over the glass he had just emptied,
and having swallowed its contents hastily, replied, "Precisely."

"Then you have already, at your age, evolved that 'instinct of death,'
which Metchnikoff, in his strange book, thinks the race will come to
when men begin living rightly, and go living on to a hundred and fifty
years or more, as they once did."

"Who is Metchnikoff, and what is the name of hi