“As I said,” he began, slowly, “it was some few years ago. Just what year it was does not matter; but at that time I had completed a course at Heidelberg, and expected shortly to set out with an exploring party for South Africa. It turned out afterward that I did not go, but for the purpose of the present story it is sufficient that I intended to do so, and had made my preparations accordingly. At Heidelberg I had lived among a set of German students who were permeated with the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann, and the rest, and I was pretty well saturated myself. At that age I was an ardent disciple of pessimism. I am still a disciple, but my ardour has abated, which is not the fault of pessimism, but the virtue of middle age—” “A man is called conservative when he grows less radical,” interrupted the journalist. “Or when he grows less in every direction,” added the Englishman, “except in physical bulk.” The alienist accepted the suggestions with an inclination, and continued. “One of my most cherished convictions,” he said, “was to the effect that every man is the sole arbiter of his fate. As Schopenhauer has put it, _‘that there is nothing to which a man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.’_ Indeed, that particular sentence had become a kind of motto with our set, and some of my companions even went so far as to preach the proper ending of life with the ending of the power of individual usefulness.” He paused to help himself to salad.