The account of two young people engaged to be married, who had taken tickets for some short journey and shot themselves in the railway carriage. "Here," he said, "was a case of absolute sanity, a quality almost undiscoverable in human nature. Two young people resolve to rid themselves of the burden; but they are more than utilitarians, they are poets, and of a high order; for, not only do they make most public and emphatic denial of life, but they add to it a measure of Aristophanesque satire--they engage themselves to marry. Now marriage is man's approval and confirmation of his belief in human existence--they engage themselves to marry, but instead of putting their threat into execution, they enter a railway carriage and blow out their brains, proving thereby that they had brains to blow out." When, however, it transpired that letters were found in the pockets of the suicides to the effect that they had hoped to gain such notoriety as the daily press can give by their very flagrant leave-taking of this world, Mike professed much regret, and gravely assured his astonished listeners that, in the face of these letters which had unhappily come to light, he withdrew his praise of the quality of the brains blown out. In truth he secretly rejoiced that proof of the imperfect sanity of the suicides had come to light and assured himself that when he did away with Mike Fletcher, that he would revenge himself on society by leaving behind him a document which would forbid the usual idiotic verdict, "Suicide while in a state of temporary insanity," and leave no loophole through which it might be said that he was impelled to seek death for any extraneous reasons whatever. He would go to death in the midst of the most perfect worldly prosperity the mind could conceive, desiring nothing but rest, profoundly convinced of the futility of all else, and the perfect folly of human effort.