Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life! "Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle! Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide. I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I thought very neat-- Je n'etais point. Je fus. Je ne suis plus. * * * * * Oh, to perish in some noble cause--to die saving another's life, even another's worthless life, to which he clung! I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door any longer. A brave man was wanted--a very brave man, who would climb the ladder, and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a forlorn hope to lead at last! Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I. He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face and immense whiskers--quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means tired of life. His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one, as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a passage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed! Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of self-destruction--even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many midnights--an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been kind enough to lend me--and under which I had written, in beautiful black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me infinite pains: I.