It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy, and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still lingers; saying, as he does so-- _"Petit bonhomme vit encore!"_ And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and retire--"Helas! petit bonhomme n'est plus! ... Pauv' petit bonhomme!" Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness, when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest posterity. May it never quite go out--it need not! May you ever be able to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie! And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verriere de Verny le Moustier) may smell sweet and blossom in the dust--a memory pleasant to recall--to this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as filial love and ancestral pride can make them.... And oh! looking _backward_ (as _we_ did), be tender to the failings of your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their long buried hearts should one day be revealed to _you_! Their faults are really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood, so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will soon, thanks to _"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"_ * * * * * Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused, in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of woe still worse than yours--worse with all the accumulated interest of long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space! * * * * *