The word eumoiros according to the above definition, tickles my fancy.  I would give a great deal to be eumoirous.  What a thing to say:  “I have achieved eumoiriety,”—­namely the quintessence of happy-fatedness dealt unto oneself by a perfect altruism!

I don’t think that hitherto my soul has been very evilly inclined, my desires base, or my actions those of a scoundrel.  Still, the negatives do not qualify one for eumoiriety.  One wants something positive.  I have an idea, therefore, of actively dealing unto myself a happy lot or portion according to the Marcian definition during the rest of the time I am allowed to breathe the upper air.  And this will be fairly easy; for no matter how excellently a man’s soul may be inclined to the performance of a good action, in ninety cases out of a hundred he is driven away from it by dread of the consequences.  Your moral teachers seldom think of this—­that the consequences of a good action are often more disastrous than those of an evil one.  But if a man is going to die, he can do good with impunity.  He can simply wallow in practical virtue.  When the boomerang of his beneficence comes back to hit him on the head—­he won’t be there to feel it.  He can thus hoist Destiny with its own petard, and, besides, being eumoirous, can spend a month or two in a peculiarly diverting manner.  The more I think of the idea the more am I in love with it.  I am going to have a seraph of a time.  I am going to play the archangel.

I shall always have pleasant memories of Murglebed.  Such an idea could not have germinated in any other atmosphere.  In the scented groves of sunny lands there would have been sown Seeds of Regret, which would have blossomed eventually into Flowers of Despair.  I should have gone about the world, a modern Admetus, snivelling at my accursed luck, without even the chance of persuading a soft-hearted Alcestis to die for me.  I should have been a dismal nuisance to society.

“Bless you,” I cried this afternoon, waving, as I leaned against a post, my hand to the ambient mud, “Renniker was wrong!  You are not a God-forsaken place.  You are impregnated with divine inspiration.”

A muddy man in a blue jersey and filthy beard who occupied the next post looked at me and spat contemptuously.  I laughed.

“If you were Marcus Aurelius,” said I, “I would make a joke—­a short life and an eumoiry one—­and he would have looked as pained as you.”

“What?” he bawled.  He was to windward of me.

I knew that if I repeated my observation he would offer to fight me.  I approached him suavely.

“I was wondering,” I said, “as it’s impossible to strike a match in this wind, whether you would let me light my pipe from yours.”

“It’s empty,” he growled.

“Take a fill from my pouch,” said I.

The mud-turtle loaded his pipe, handed me my pouch without acknowledgment, stuck his pipe in his breeches pocket, spat again, and, deliberately turning his back, on me, lounged off to another post on a remoter and less lunatic-ridden portion of the shore.  Again I laughed, feeling, as the poet did with the daffodils, that one could not but be gay in such a jocund company.