any other physician can tell you. Life 'goes
out,' like a lamp when the materials supplying the electric current
are exhausted; and yet here all the waste of which physic can take
cognisance is fully repaired, and the circuit is not broken."

"What are the symptoms, then?"

"They are all reducible to one--exhaustion of the will, the prime
element of personality. The patient ceases to _care_. It is too much
trouble to work; then too much trouble to read; then too much trouble
to exert even those all but mechanical powers of thought which are
necessary to any kind of social intercourse--to give an order, to
answer a question, to recognise a name or a face: then even the
passions die out, till the patient cannot be provoked to rate a stupid
amba or a negligent wife; finally, there is not energy to dress or
undress, to rise up or sit down. Then the patient is allowed to die:
if kept alive perforce, he would finally lack the energy to eat or
even to breathe. And yet, all this time, the man is alive, the self is
there; and I have prolonged life, or rather renewed it, for a time, by
some chance stimulus that has reached the inner sight through the
thickening veil, and shocked the essential man into willing and
thinking once more as he thought and willed when he was younger than
his grandchildren are now.... It is well that some of us who know best
how long the flesh may be kept in life, are, in right of that very
knowledge, proof against the wish to keep the life in the flesh for
ever."

CHAPTER VII - ESCORT DUTY.

Immediately after breakfast the next morning my host invited me to the
gate of his garden, where stood one of the carriages I had seen before
in the distance, but never had an opportunity of examining. It rested
on three wheels, the two hind ones by far larger than that in front,
which merely served to sustain the equilibrium of the body and to
steer. The material was the silver-like metal of which most Martial
vessels and furniture are formed, every spar, pole, and cross-piece
being a hollow cylinder; a construction which, with the extreme
lightness of the metal itself, made the carriage far lighter than any
I had seen on Earth. The body consisted of a seat with sides, back,
and footboard, wide enough to accommodate two persons with ease. It
was attached by strong elastic fastenings to a frame consisting of
four light poles rising from the framework in which the axles turned;
completely dispensing with the