What an atmosphere the chemical laboratory is for one of my temperament! What a fascination there is in the thought that the door of escape for the world weary,--which, as dear old Epictetus said, is always open,--is so near--so near that one must needs be careful lest he pass the portals ere he is ready. How many times have I wondered if what the text books say of arseniureted hydrogen, and of anhydrous hydrocyanic acid is really true. And how many times have I been tempted to--well, to put them to a test on a fellow worker. Not upon myself, for I am not yet ready, and I do not court death by accident. My own death must be philosophic when it comes, not sudden and devoid of impressions. Then, too, the slower things are more to my taste--morphine for example. When I am ready--when life becomes insupportable boredom, or an intolerable ache, I shall know just where and how to seek surcease of world tire. And what a record I will write of my impressions. How deliberate and scientific it will all be. And how sure I will make it. These amateurs, with their crude methods and cowardly shrinkings back from the brink--faugh! how I detest them. The idiots! what a mess some of them make of it, and how some of them suffer. As for the fools who do such bungling work that any cheap doctor called in a hurry can undo the thing--no words of mine can express my contempt for them. That doctor who swallowed six grains of morphine and then when the mist began to rise, sent for another fool of his own profession to succor him, was a coward and a bungler. But, I have said that a suicide is never a coward. Yes, and I meant it, too; that doctor was a pretender, and not born in the purple. These love lorn servant girls and heart sick youths who drink to Death libations of carbolic acid are most amusing folk. They have courage, it is true, and doubtless mean well, but they lack the brains to be original and clever. They are faddists gone mad. I have studied all of the methods of suicide in vogue and the more I see of them, the wiser I think I was in selecting chemistry as my life work. I have haunted the morgue; I have followed to that horrid, dripping, smelly slab, every case of suicide that has happened in this city. And such sights as I have seen! Bloated, festering masses of flesh that required great imagination to fashion into human semblance, fresh dragged from summer waters; distorted, blackened faces on agony twisted forms freshly cut down from self-made gibbets; heads blown open, brain-bespattered and powder-marked by the pistol; limbs crushed and torn into disgusting masses and shreds of ghastly flesh, the bones staring through in besplintered protest against the savagery of men who seek rest beneath the crunching wheels of locomotives; sickening, fresh made gashes in throats that were once fair to look upon--all these have I seen and marveled at.