latter and, reaching out with a slender foot, drew the chair closer. "Sit
up close, and let's hear what my future grandson had to say."




CHAPTER III


Braden Thorpe had spent two years in the New York hospitals, after
graduation from Johns Hopkins, and had been sent to Germany and Austria by
his grandfather when he was twenty-seven, to work under the advanced
scientists of Vienna and Berlin. At twenty-nine he came back to New York,
a serious-minded, purposeful man, wrapped up in his profession and
heterodoxically humane, to use the words of his grandfather. The first day
after his return he confided to his grim old relative the somewhat
unprofessional opinion that hopelessly afflicted members of the human race
should be put out of their misery by attending physicians, operating under
the direction of a commission appointed to consider such cases, and that
the act should be authorised by law!

His grandfather, being seventy-six and apparently as healthy as any one
could hope to be at that age, said that he thought it would be just as
well to kill 'em legally as any other way, having no good opinion of
doctors, and admitted that his grandson had an exceptionally soft heart in
him even though his head was a trifle harder and thicker than was
necessary in one so young.

"It's worth thinking about, anyhow, isn't it, granddaddy?" Braden had
said, with great earnestness.