SCRIPTOR.  Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on his shoulders.  I know the images of death that please you, Lector—­such as that great one of Arnold’s, about ’the sounding labour-house vast of being.’

But, Lector, you who love work so well—­have you never heard tell of a thing called Rest?  Have you never known what it is to be tired, my Lector?—­not tired at the end of a busy day, but tired in the morning, tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on their blithe insistent rounds.  No, the man who is tired of a morning sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his morning bath.  But will you never want to go to bed, Lector?  Will you be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all?  Yet in a few years’ time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten.  May it not be so with sleep’s twin-brother?  In our young vigour, driven by a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or romance can overcome—­don’t you think that then ‘bedtime’ will come to seem the best hour of the day, and ’Death as welcome as a friend would fall’?

LECTOR.  But you are no fair judge, Scriptor.  You say my health, my youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court.  Yet surely your ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?

SCRIPTOR.  Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my particular condition.  But you forget that the condition I have been supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most general among men.  Was it not old age?—­which, like youth, is independent of years.  You may be young beyond your years, I may be old in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the desire of rest.

LECTOR.  But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its imagination?  Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain hours of its youth over again?—­and would the old man not give all he possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?

SCRIPTOR.  He would give everything—­but the certainty of rest.  After seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us in.  Besides, age may not be so sure of the advantages of youth.  All is not youth that laughs and glitters.  Youth has its hopes, which are uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its passions, but age has its comforts.

LECTOR.  Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice betrays you.  In spite of you, it saddens all your words.  Tell me, have you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you?  Have you looked on death face to face?