St. John proceeds to characterize four eminent men who underwent more or less radical transformations in the early stages or youth of old age, as follows. Tolstoy[10] was a typical convert. He witnessed the horror of his grandmother’s death, which profoundly affected all his later views. When he was about twelve, a schoolmate told him that there was no God and that all thought about Him was an invention; and he accepted this news and went on in a few years to Nihilism. In later life he asked himself if he should become “more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, and Molière, what then?” and he could not answer. The ground crumbled under him. There was no reason to live. Every day was bringing him nearer to the precipice and yet he could not stop. He felt he could live no longer and the idea of suicide as a last resort was always with him and he had to practice self-deception to escape it. Yet he had a pagan love of life. He found his status summed up in an Eastern fable of a traveler who is attacked by a wild beast and attempts to escape by letting himself down into a dried-up well, at the bottom of which he finds a dragon, and so is forced to cling to a wild plant that grows on the wall. Suddenly he sees two mice (one black and one white--day and night) nibbling the plant from which he hangs and in despair he looks about, still with a faint hope of escape. On the leaves of this wild plant he sees a few drops of honey and even with fear at his heart he stretches out his tongue and licks them. Thus the dragon of death inevitably awaits him, while even the honey he tries to taste no longer rejoices him for it is not sweet. “I cannot turn my eyes from the mice or the dragon. Both are no fable.”