t on a hot day, slight fatigue after a ball, a
little heaviness in his limbs after a long walk, were of no importance.

"Well, how are you to-day?" cried Dr. Thiel, rising to meet him.

"Fairly well," replied Linden, clasping both his hands.

"Yet, surely you look rather downcast?" asked the physician.

"For good reasons," answered Linden sighing.

"What is the matter now? Have you no appetite after eating? Do you feel
more tired at midnight than in the morning?"

"Don't ridicule me. You don't know what day this is."

Thiel looked at him inquiringly.

"My birthday," said Linden mournfully.

"Why, to be sure," cried Thiel, "let me see, what one is it?"

"No number," interrupted Linden quickly, covering his friend's mouth with
his hand.

"You're worse than a coquette," remarked Thiel, pushing his hand away.
He had had "an old coquette" on the tip of his tongue, but suppressed the
adjective. "A man can speak of his age without regret, when he is only
in the mid-forties."

"Not yet the middle, I beg of you," Linden eagerly protested, "I am
forty-four years old to-day."

Thiel smiled. "Well, I wish you many happy----"

Linden did not let him finish. "Happiness! Happiness! Is there any
happiness after youth is over?"

"Everything depends upon what is meant by happiness."

Linden did not seem to hear what Thiel was saying, but pursued his own
train of thought. "How futile your science is! You find a bacillus
here, a ptomain there. What use is that to me? None! Teach me how to
keep young forever, then I shall have some respect for your staring into
your beloved microscope. The ancients alone were right in that, as in
everything else. To die young. In undiminished vigour. The gods can
bestow no greater happiness. What is there to seek in life when youth
has fled?"

"Nothing, of course, if, like a drone, we have but a single task in
existence: to live. A drone must die, when it has performed its mission.
I am not at all blind to the beauty of the butterfly, which lets its
magnificent velvet wings glisten in the sunshine throughout a long summer
day, and has no organs for receiving nourishment, but does nothing except
hover around flowers and the females of his species, wooing and loving,
and dies in the evening without ever waking from his ecstasy of delight.
It is the same thing with the flower. It blooms, exhales its fragrance,
displays beautiful forms and colours merely for the purpose o