And in the club some man will take your seat at lunch, and the others will say you were a decent sort of fellow and will not joke loudly for a whole meal-time. And ten years hence who will remember you? Your wife and children, of course--if they too have not also been carried away in long boxes; a few men who look upon you with a kindly patronage as one who has fallen in the fight and cannot compete with them now; but otherwise? Your hospital appointments have long been filled up by men who cannot, you think, do your work half so well as you used to do it; your car is long ago turned into scrap-iron; your little dog, which used to yelp so joyously when you got home tired at night and kicked him out of the way, is long dead and buried under your favourite rose-bush; your library, which was your joy for so many years, has long been sold at about one-tenth of what it cost you; and, except for the woman who was foolish enough to love and marry you and the children whom the good creature brought into the world to carry on your name, you are as though you had never been. Why should this be? And why are you so terrified at the prospect? During the past few years we have had ample experience of death, for there are few families in Australia, and I suppose in England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Europe generally, which have not lost some beloved member; yet we are no nearer solving the mystery than we were before. We know no more about it than did Socrates or Homer. The only thing that is beginning to haunt the minds of many men is whether those gallant boys who died in the war were not better off than the men who survived. At least they know the worst, if there be anything to know; and have no longer to fear cancer and paralysis and the other diseases of later life. Many men have written in a consolatory vein about old age, but the consolants have in no way answered the dictum that if by reason of strength our years exceed threescore and ten, yet is our strength but labour and sorrow. No doctor who has seen an old man with an enlarged prostate and a septic kidney therefrom, or with cancer of the tongue, can refrain from wishing that that man had died twenty years sooner, because however bad the fate in store for him it can hardly be worse than what he suffers here on earth. And possibly there are worse things on earth even than cancer of the tongue; possibly cancer of the bladder is the most atrocious, or right-sided hemiplegia with its aphasia and deadly depression of soul. Young men do not suffer from these things; and no one can attend a man so afflicted without wishing that the patient had died happily by a bullet in Gallipoli before his time came so to suffer. Yet as a man grows older, though the likelihood of his death becomes more and more with every passing year, his clinging to bare life, however painful and terrible that life may be, becomes more intense. The young hardly seem to fear death; that is a fear almost confined to the aged.