The century that had passed had taken with it its marks and scars, leaving the great features in their original purity of design, lean, smooth, and clearly defined.  That last change in living man is rare enough, but when once seen is not to be forgotten.  There is something in the faces of the very, very old which hardly suggests age at all, but rather the vague possibility of a returning prime.  Only the hands tell the tale, with their huge, shining, fleshless joints, their shadowy hollows, and their unnatural yellow nails.

The old man lay quite still, breathing softly through his snowy beard.  Unorna came to his side.  There was something of wonder and admiration in her own eyes as she stood there gazing upon the face which other generations of men and women, all long dead, had looked upon and known.  The secret of life and death was before her each day when she entered that room, and on the very verge of solution.  The wisdom hardly gained in many lands was striving with all its concentrated power to preserve that life; the rare and subtle gifts which she herself possessed were daily exercised to their full in the suggestion of vitality; the most elaborate inventions of skilled mechanicians were employed in reducing the labour of living to the lowest conceivable degree of effort.  The great experiment was being tried.  What Keyork Arabian described as the embalming of a man still alive was being attempted.  And he lived.  For years they had watched him and tended him, and looked critically for the least signs of a diminution or an augmentation in his strength.  They knew that he was now in his one hundred and seventh year, and yet he lived and was no weaker.  Was there a limit; or was there not, since the destruction of the tissues was arrested beyond doubt, so far as the most minute tests could show?  Might there not be, in the slow oscillations of nature, a degree of decay, on this side of death, from which a return should be possible, provided that the critical moment were passed in a state of sleep and under perfect conditions?  How do we know that all men must die?  We suppose the statement to be true by induction, from the undoubted fact that men have hitherto died within a certain limit of age.  By induction, too, our fathers, our grandfathers, knew that it was impossible for man to traverse the earth faster than at the full speed of a galloping horse.  After several thousand years of experience that piece of knowledge, which seemed to be singularly certain, was suddenly proved to be the grossest ignorance by a man who had been in the habit of playing with a tea-kettle when a boy.  We ourselves, not very long ago, knew positively, as all men had known since the beginning of the world, that it was quite impossible to converse with a friend at a distance beyond the carrying power of a speaking trumpet.  To-day, a boy who does not know that one may talk very agreeably with a friend a thousand miles away is an ignoramus; and experimenters