‘Here’s a chapter on the easiest way of putting a stop to it all,’ he answered. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘He was a medical man--wasn’t he? I’m ashamed to say I know nothing about him.’ ‘Yes, certainly he was.’ ‘Then he knew what he was about.’ ‘As well probably as any man of his profession at the time.’ ‘He recommends drowning,’ said Charley, without raising his eyes from the book. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I mean for suicide.’ ‘Nonsense, He was the last man to favour that. You must make a mistake. He was a thoroughly Christian man.’ ‘I know nothing about that. Hear this.’ He read the following passages from the beginning of the thirteenth section of the second part. ‘With what shifts and pains we come into the world, we remember not; but ‘tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it. Many have studied to exasperate the ways of death, but fewer hours have been spent to soften that necessity.’--‘Ovid, the old heroes, and the Stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their soul, which they conceived to be a fire, stood probably in fear of an easier way of death; wherein the water, entering the possessions of air, makes a temporary suffocation, and kills as it were without a fever. Surely many, who have had the spirit to destroy themselves, have not been ingenious in the contrivance thereof.’--‘Cato is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his delivery, not in the point but the pummel of his sword.’ ‘Poison. I suppose,’ he said, as he ended the extract. ‘Yes, that’s the story, if you remember,’ I answered; ‘but I don’t see that Sir Thomas is favouring suicide. Not at all. What he writes there is merely a speculation on the comparative ease of different modes of dying. Let me see it.’ I took the book from his hands, and, glancing over the essay, read the closing passage. ‘But to learn to die, is better than to study the ways of dying. Death will find some ways to untie or cut the most gordian knots of life, and make men’s miseries as mortal as themselves: whereas evil spirits, as undying substances, are unseparable from their calamities; and, therefore, they everlastingly struggle under their angustias, and, bound up with immortality, can never get out of themselves.’ ‘There! I told you so!’ cried Charley. Don’t you see? He is the most cunning arguer--beats Despair in the _Fairy Queen_ hollow!’ By this time, either attracted by the stately flow of Sir Thomas’s speech, or by the tone of our disputation, the two girls had drawn nearer, and were listening. ‘What _do_ you mean, Charley?’ I said, perceiving, however, the hold I had by my further quotation given him.