of the earth, in
a black cavern hollowed beneath the lowest foundations of the oldest
church, the brick liver was built by the cunning magicians of old, to
last for ever, to purify the city's blood, to regulate the city's life,
and in a measure to control its destinies by means of its passions. A
few wise men have handed down the knowledge of the brick liver to each
other from generation to generation, but the rest of the inhabitants are
ignorant of its existence. They alone know that every vicissitude of
the city's condition is traceable to that source--its sadness, its
merriment, its carnivals and its lents, its health and its disease, its
prosperity and the hideous plagues which at distant intervals kill one
in ten of the population. Is it not a pretty thought?"

"I do not understand you," said Kafka, wearily.

"It is a very practical idea," continued Keyork, amused with his own
fancies, "and it will yet be carried out. The great cities of the
next century will each have a liver of brick and mortar and iron and
machinery, a huge mechanical purifier. You smile! Ah, my dear boy, truth
and phantasm are very much the same to you! You are too young. How
can you be expected to care for the great problem of problems, for the
mighty question of prolonging life?"

Keyork laughed again, with a meaning in his laughter which escaped his
companion altogether.

"How can you be expected to care?" he repeated. "And yet men used to say
that it was the duty of strong youth to support the trembling weakness
of feeble old age."

His eyes twinkled with a diabolical mirth.

"No," said Kafka. "I do not care. Life is meant to be short. Life is
meant to be storm, broken with gleams of love's sunshine. Why prolong
it? If it is unhappy you would only draw out the unhappiness to greater
lengths, and such joy as it has is joy only because it is quick, sudden,
violent. I would concentrate a lifetime into an instant, if I could,
and then die content in having suffered everything, enjoyed everything,
dared everything in the flash of a great lightning between two total
darknesses. But to drag on through slow sorrows, or to crawl through a
century of contentment--never! Better be mad, or asleep, and unconscious
of the time."

"You are a very desperate person!" exclaimed Keyork. "If you had the
management of this unstable world you would make it a very convulsive
and nervous place. We should all turn into flaming ephemerides,
fluttering about