ction has passed into
so desirable a state as death."

"So we are--those of us who have cultivated philosophy, history and logic;
but this poor fellow is still under the domination of feelings inherited
from a million ignorant and superstitious ancestors--for Lalugnan was once
as barbarous a country as your own. The most grotesque and frightful
conceptions of death, and life after death, were current; and now many of
even those whose understandings are emancipated wear upon their feelings
the heavy chain of heredity."

"But," said I, "granting for the sake of the argument which I am about to
build upon the concession" (I could not bring myself to use the idiotic
and meaningless phrase, "for the sake of argument") "that death,
especially the death of a Lalugwump, is desirable, yet the act of dying,
the transition state between living and being dead, may be accompanied by
the most painful physical, and most terrifying mental phenomena. The
moment of dissolution may seem to the exalted sensibilities of the
moribund a century of horrors."

The great man smiled again, with a more intolerable benignity than before.
"There is no such thing as dying," he said; "the 'transition state' is a
creation of your fancy and an evidence of imperfect reason. One is at any
time either alive or dead. The one condition cannot shade off into the
other. There is no gradation like that between waking and sleeping. By the
way, do you recognize a certain resemblance between death and a dreamless
sleep?"

"Yes--death as you conceive it to be."

"Well, does any one fear sleep? Do we not seek it, court it, wish that it
may be sound--that is to say, dreamless? We desire occasional
annihilation--wish to be dead for eight and ten hours at a time. True, we
expect to awake, but that expectation, while it may account for our
alacrity in embracing sleep, cannot alter the character of the state that
we cheerfully go into. Suppose we did _not_ wake in the morning, never did
wake! Would our mental and spiritual condition be in any respect different
through all eternity from what it was during the first few hours? After how
many hours does oblivion begin to be an evil? The man who loves to sleep
yet hates to die might justly be granted everlasting life with everlasting
insomnia."

Gnarmag-Zote paused and appeared to be lost in the profundity of his
thoughts, but I could easily enough see that he was only taking breath.
The old man whose grief had given