and would try to remember what they looked like, how
they talked, and their manner of walking or taking snuff.
After a time they became interested in the problems
which these people submitted to their parents and the
replies or instructions wherewith the latter relieved them.
Long training had made the children able to sit perfectly
quiet, so that when the talk came to the interesting part
they were entirely forgotten, and ideas which might
otherwise have been spared their youth became the com-
monplaces of their conversation.

When the children were ten years of age one of the
Philosophers died. He called the household together
and announced that the time had come when he must bid
them all good-bye, and that his intention was to die as
quickly as might be. It was, he continued, an unfortu-
nate thing that his health was at the moment more robust
than it had been for a long time, but that, of course, was
no obstacle to his resolution, for death did not depend
upon ill-health but upon a multitude of other factors with
the details whereof he would not trouble them.

His wife, the Grey Woman of Dun Gortin, ap-
plauded this resolution and added as an amendment that
it was high time he did something, that the life he had
been leading was an arid and unprofitable one, that he
had stolen her fourteen hundred maledictions for which
he had no use and presented her with a child for which
she had none, and that, all things concerned, the sooner
he did die and stop talking the sooner everybody con-