“Like an emetic, one thing brings up another,” put in Methuselah, anxious to throw up his grievance. “Having told us it is one’s duty to dismiss himself from the world, this authority very kindly suggested that a particular anæsthetic would be the best means for one’s transfer out of time. The edict has gone forth: All out at sixty. When the census-taker makes his rounds, he will say: ‘Age, if you please? Sixty? Kindly step into the asphyxiation chamber or into the ambulance where you will find a bottle awaiting you. Good-night’. Night, when deep sleep falleth upon man, has come too early. When a babe, he smelleth the bottle afar off and lo! children cry for the soothing syrup which the man would fain put away. Before his eye is dimmed by the sunset glow, the light of his life is quenched in four ounces of chloroform. “According to this medical expert,” continued Methuselah, “when a man proposes to celebrate his sixtieth birthday by emigrating beyond the Styx, he is to buy a ticket and pay for it with poison or pistol. He is then fit only for the doctor and the refuse heap. Has it come to this? No twentieth century painless surgery for me, thank you. Long life is no longer a thing to long for. I would prefer to be kissed not by the dews of night but by the salutation of the glorious morning.” “‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,’” exclaimed Solomon, who still the wisest of men, had hitherto kept silent. He was addressing Methuselah. “One may no longer tarry until his beard is grown and his hair is dyed. No longer may he come to his grave in a full age like as a shock of corn cometh in his season, and though it may go against the grain, the Grim Reaper stalks through the field, stopping up the ears with Osler’s Death Drugs.” “The doctor is an homeopathist,” observed Sherlock Holmes, in a tone so decided that it left no question for argument. “I’m not Watson,” I responded, “but of course I know you want some one to ask you how you know. Just to be accommodating, allow me to inquire how you can tell that Dr. Osler is an homeopathist when you haven’t even the ashes of his cigar to analyze? Do you mean because of small doses?” “No; like cures like. Old men being a drug on the market, it takes a drug to remove them. Had he consulted me I would have recommended cocaine instead of chloroform.” “Do you think that Dr. Osler will take his own medicine when the frost is on the temples and the anæsthetic’s handy?” “Doctors never do. That may be because of professional etiquette, but it is more likely that the physicians recognize the truth of the saying about self-preservation being the first law of nature. Some doctors are so conscientious that they would rather be murdered by another physician than commit suicide themselves. You may depend upon it that there is no chloroform in Dr. Osler’s family medicine chest; he keeps it only for his patients!” [Illustration: _The Virgin Throned in the West. Chapter VI_]