with a peculiar expression, and said, "Do you really want to know?"

"To be sure I do; haven't I come----"

"You have heard that I have been given over as incurable. The last doctor was an older man than you. What do you hope to effect?"

"To effect a cure; I do not give you up. I do not think your disease is consumption. I hope in time to----"

"To what?" he asked, nervously.

"Well, to be able to serve you."

"No," he cried, "not to serve me, but to cure me."

"In curing you, shall I not serve you?"

"No. I do not want to be cured. Leave me to die, if you want to serve me."

"Oh, my dear young man," I cried, "don't talk like that. Your malady is not of the sort that you need fear death so soon."

"Fear death!" he exclaimed. "On the contrary, I seek death. I desire to die."

"What! you desire to die? A young man like you, in the pride of your youth, with the whole world before you. What can make you so tired of your life?"

"Because my life's a burden to me."

"Poor young man," I said, "can you have suffered so much! Ah," I muttered, half to myself, "youth has its sufferings as well as age."

I was young myself then, and I had suffered. I felt the deepest sympathy for my patient.

"If," I resumed, "in curing you I could make life cease to be a burden----"

"I would not accept the offer," he replied. "What should I gain by it? The grosser material part of my nature would be rendered more gross, more material; capable only of those delights that the grossest minds revel in, to the utter exclusion of those sublime visions and inspirations which visit the soul when least clogged with matter. It would be to exchange a paradise for a pandemonium; high, exalted thoughts and feelings for low and groveling ones. No," he said; "he who, like me, has tasted both lives will hardly throw away the higher for the lower."

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