One of the last of their great series of exilings had been to cast out of their midst a number of men and women who never did anything but long for death, and advocated early suicide with religious fervour as the true and only panacea for all ills. Their doctrines would have done little harm to the community, if they had not been rooted in practice, and often led to tragic results. For they came from languid, low-strung temperaments, that felt disinclined to face the strain of life or to help the advance of the race. The current of energy in their ancestry had gradually run more and more feebly, till it was in them at its lowest ebb. It was against their grain to work, and they did their share in the tasks of the community with the most patent reluctance. This alone would have been reason enough for their exile, inasmuch as they gave evil example to the youth around. But they were subtle in the use of the tongue too, and could with skilful jesuitry show how indolence was the noblest life. And worse still, when they were left to their own devices, they soon made a violent end to their feeble lives, and gave a tragic and ghastly appearance to death. Out into Thanasia or the isle of death they were one and all deported, with enough goods and provisions to keep them and their descendants alive, if only they were industrious, for thousands of years. But none of them would work, or till the soil, or even cook their food; and one by one they gave themselves up to death. The more ingenious invented a method of leaving life which had a certain grace if not nobility. They erected great funeral pyres and connected them by a slow fuse to a huge battery that sent up its rod into the heavens. When a tempest threatened, they laid themselves out on these, and when the lightning began to flash, the electricity ran along the wires, lit their fagots, and in a few moments swept them out of existence. It was not long before the isle of death was again left to its silences, nothing but the ashes of its former inhabitants upon the tops of numerous mounds being left to tell that human life had once been there. No one from the rest of the archipelago seemed to care for life upon it; none ever landed there. The only things that marred the mortuary stillness of the isle were the screaming seabirds, and the tempests which drove them thither.