satisfied with the lot that Fate has given to my unworthy self.

To begin with, I am still alive and in health when by all the rules I
should have been dead many times over. I suppose I ought to be
thankful for that but, before expressing an opinion on the point, I
should have to be quite sure whether it is better to be alive or dead.
The religious plump for the latter, though I have never observed that
the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.

For instance, if they are told that their holy hearts are wrong, they
spend time and much money in rushing to a place called Nauheim in
Germany, to put them right by means of water-drinking, thereby
shortening their hours of heavenly bliss and depriving their heirs of
a certain amount of cash. The same thing applies to Buxton in my own
neighbourhood and gout, especially when it threatens the stomach or
the throat. Even archbishops will do these things, to say nothing of
such small fry as deans, or stout and prominent lay figures of the
Church.

From common sinners like myself such conduct might be expected, but in
the case of those who are obviously poised on the topmost rungs of the
Jacobean--I mean, the heavenly--ladder, it is legitimate to inquire
why they show such reluctance in jumping off. As a matter of fact the
only persons that, individually, I have seen quite willing to die,
except now and again to save somebody else whom they were so foolish
as to care for more than they did for themselves, have been not those
"upon whom the light has shined" to quote an earnest paper I chanced
to read this morning, but, to quote again, "the sinful heathen
wandering in their native blackness," by which I understand the writer
to refer to their moral state and not to their sable skins wherein for