se, where
happiness and bliss and contentment fill all men's hearts, but its
gates could only be reached by dying. This tradition was handed down
for ages from generation to generation--but none knew exactly what
death was except that it led to Paradise.

Quite unlike Sentaro and other ordinary people, instead of having a
great dread of death, they all, both rich and poor, longed for it as
something good and desirable. They were all tired of their long, long
lives, and longed to go to the happy land of contentment called
Paradise of which the priests had told them centuries ago.

All this Sentaro soon found out by talking to the islanders. He found
himself, according to his ideas, in the land of Topsyturvydom.
Everything was upside down. He had wished to escape from dying. He had
come to the land of Perpetual Life with great relief and joy, only to
find that the inhabitants themselves, doomed never to die, would
consider it bliss to find death.

What he had hitherto considered poison these people ate as good food,
and all the things to which he had been accustomed as food they
rejected. Whenever any merchants from other countries arrived, the rich
people rushed to them eager to buy poisons. These they swallowed
eagerly, hoping for death to come so that they might go to Paradise.

But what were deadly poisons in other lands were without effect in this
strange place, and people who swallowed them with the hope of dying,
only found that in a short time they felt better in health instead of
worse.

Vainly they tried to imagine what death could be like. The wealthy
would have given all their money and all their goods if they could but
shorten their lives to two or three hundred years even. Without any
change to live on forever seemed to this people wearisome and sad.

In the chemist shops there was a drug which was in constant demand,
because after using it for a hundred years, it was supposed to turn the
hair slightly gray and to bring about disorders of the stomach.

Sentaro was astonished to find that the poisonous globe-fish was served
up in restaurants as a delectable dish, and hawkers in the streets went
about selling sauces made of Spanish flies. He never saw any one ill
after eating these horrible things, nor did he ever see any one with as
much as a cold.

Sentaro was delighted. He said to himself that he would never grow
tired of living, and that he considered it profane to wish for death.
He was the only