THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [very persuasively] But do you think you would be popular in North America?  It seems to me, if I may say so, that on your own shewing you need a country in which society is organized in a series of highly exclusive circles, in which the privacy of private life is very jealously guarded, and in which no one presumes to speak to anyone else without an introduction following a strict examination of social credentials.  It is only in such a country that persons of special tastes and attainments can form a little world of their own, and protect themselves absolutely from intrusion by common persons.  I think I may claim that our British society has developed this exclusiveness to perfection.  If you would pay us a visit and see the working of our caste system, our club system, our guild system, you would admit that nowhere else in the world, least of all, perhaps in North America, which has a regrettable tradition of social promiscuity, could you keep yourselves so entirely to yourselves.

ZOZIM [good-naturedly embarrassed] Look here.  There is no good discussing this.  I had rather not explain; but it wont make any difference to our Colonizers what sort of short-livers they come across.  We shall arrange all that.  Never mind how.  Let us join the ladies.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [throwing off his diplomatic attitude and abandoning himself to despair] We understand you only too well, sir.  Well, kill us.  End the lives you have made miserably unhappy by opening up to us the possibility that any of us may live three hundred years.  I solemnly curse that possibility.  To you it may be a blessing, because you do live three hundred years.  To us, who live less than a hundred, whose flesh is as grass, it is the most unbearable burden our poor tortured humanity has ever groaned under.

THE ENVOY.  Hullo, Poppa!  Steady!  How do you make that out?

ZOZIM.  What is three hundred years?  Short enough, if you ask me.  Why, in the old days you people lived on the assumption that you were going to last out for ever and ever and ever.  Immortal, you thought yourselves.  Were you any happier then?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  As President of the Baghdad Historical Society I am in a position to inform you that the communities which took this monstrous pretension seriously were the most wretched of which we have any record.  My Society has printed an editio princeps of the works of the father of history, Thucyderodotus Macolly-buckle.  Have you read his account of what was blasphemously called the Perfect City of God, and the attempt made to reproduce it in the northern part of these islands by Jonhobsnoxius, called the Leviathan?  Those misguided people sacrificed the fragment of life that was granted to them to an imaginary immortality.  They crucified the prophet who told them to take no thought for the morrow, and that here and now was their Australia:  Australia being a term signifying paradise, or an eternity of bliss.  They tried to produce a condition of death in life:  to mortify the flesh, as they called it.