gned if
he prefers, but the going man, the _gone_ man, was rapturously ready to
die, in untold thousands of martyrdoms, because he believed that he
should live again."

The first speaker smiled compassionately, and perhaps also a little
patronizingly. "I'm not sure that you have met the point exactly.
Metchnikoff denies, on the basis of scientific knowledge, that it is
possible for a man, being dead, to live again. In those two extremely
interesting chapters of his, which treat of the 'Religious Remedies' and
the 'Philosophical Remedies' for the 'disharmonies of the human
constitution,' he is quite as unsparing of the sages as of the saints.
The Christians and the Buddhists fare no worse than Plato and the
Stoics; the last are no less unscientific than the first in his view,
and no less fallacious. What he asks is not that we shall be resigned or
enraptured in view of death, but that we shall physically desire it
when we are tired of living, just as we physically desire sleep when we
are tired of waking."

"And to that end," the light skirmisher said, "he asks nothing but that
we shall live a hundred and fifty years."

"No, he asks that we shall live such natural lives that we shall die
natural deaths, which are voluntary deaths. He contends that most of us
now die accidental and violent deaths."

The woman who had caught on demanded, "Why does he think we could live a
century and a half?"

"From analogies in the lives of other animals and from the facts of our
constitution. He instances the remarkable cases of longevity recorded in
the Bible."

"I think he's very inconsistent," his pursuer continued. "The Bible says
men lived anywhere from a hundred to nine hundred years, and he thinks
it quite possible. The Bible says that men live after death, and he
thinks that's impossible."

"Well, have you ever met a man who had lived after death?" the first
speaker asked.

"No. Have you ever met a man two hundred years old? If it comes to
undeniable proof there is far more proof of ghosts than of
bicentenarians."

"Very well, then, I get out of it by saying that I don't believe in
either."

"And leave Metchnikoff in the lurch!" the light skirmisher reproached
him. "You don't believe in the instinct of death! And I was just going
to begin living to a hundred and fifty and dying voluntarily by leaving
off cheese. Now I will take some of the Gorgonzola."

Everybody laughed but the first speaker and the woman who had