annoyance, and I met his gaze fully and frankly. His eyes shifted
uneasily away from mine.

"One may feel a pardonable curiosity," he said, "And a desire to
know--"

"To know what?" I asked, with some warmth--"How can you obtain what
you are secretly craving for, if you persist in denying what is
true? You are afraid of death--yet you invite it by ignoring the
source of life! The curtain is down,--you are outside eternal
realities altogether in a chaos of your own voluntary creation!"

I spoke with some passion, and he heard me patiently.

"Let us try to understand each other," he said, after a pause--
"though it will be difficult. You speak of 'eternal realities.' To
me there are none, save the constant scattering and re-uniting of
atoms. These, so far as we know of the extraordinary (and to me
quite unintelligent) plan of the Universe, are for ever shifting and
changing into various forms and clusters of forms, such as solar
systems, planets, comets, star-dust and the like. Our present view
of them is chiefly based on the researches of Larmor and Thomson of
Cambridge. From them and other scientists we learn that electricity
exists in small particles which we can in a manner see in the
'cathode' rays,--and these particles are called 'electrons.' These
compose 'atoms of matter.' Well!--there are a trillion of atoms in
each granule of dust,--while electrons are so much smaller, that a
hundred thousand of them can lie in the diameter of an atom. I know
all this,--but I do not know why the atoms or electrons should exist
at all, nor what cause there should be for their constant and often