startled by a piteous noise of crying, and the three found themselves confronted by an old woman dripping with sea-water, and with an expression on her face of the utmost misery. They soon recognised her as one of the passengers on the ship. She told them how she had been floated ashore on a spar, and how she had been sustained by a little roast pig, that kindly begged her to eat it, having first lain in her bosom to restore her to warmth. She was now looking for her son.

'And if I cannot find him,' said the old woman, 'I shall never smile again. He has half broken my heart,' she went on, 'by his wicked ways. But if I thought he was dead—dead in the midst of his sins—it would be broken altogether; for in that case he must certainly be in hell.'

'Old woman,' said the Professor, very slowly and solemnly, 'be comforted. I announce to you that your son is alive.'

'Oh, bless you, sir, for that word!' cried the old woman. 'But where is he? Have you seen him? Are you sure that he is living?'

'I am sure of it,' said the Professor, 'because enlightened thought shows me that he cannot be anything else. It is true that I saw him sink for a third time in the sea, and that he was then snapped up by a shark. But he is as much alive as ever in his posthumous activities. He has made you wretched after him; and that is his future life. Become an exact thinker, and you will see that this is so. Old woman,' added the Professor solemnly, 'old woman, listen to me—You and your son are in hell.'

At this the old woman flew into a terrible rage.

'In hell, sir!' she exclaimed; 'me in hell!—a poor lone woman like me! How dare you!' And she sank back in a chair and fainted.

'Alas!' said the Professor, 'thus is misery again introduced into the world. A fourth part of Humanity is now miserable.'

The curate answered promptly that if no restoratives were given her, she would probably die in a few minutes. 'And to let her die,' he said, 'is clearly our solemn duty. It will be for the greatest happiness of the greatest number.'

'No,' said the Professor; 'for our sense of pity would then be wounded, and the happiness of all of us would be marred by that.'

'Excuse me,' said the curate; 'but exact thought shows me that pity for others is but the imagining of their misfortune falling on ourselves. Now, we can none of us imagine ourselves exactly in the old woman's case; therefore it is quite impossible that we can pity her.'

'But,' said the Professor, 'such an act would violate our ideas of justice.'

'You are wrong again,' said the curate, 'for exact thought shows me that the love of justice is nothing but the fear of suffering injustice. If we were to kill strong men, we might naturally fear that strong men would kill us. But whatever we do to fainting old women, we cannot expect that fainting old women will do anything to us in return.'

'Your reasoning cannot be sound,' said the Professor, 'for it would lead to the most horrible conclusions. I will solve the difficulty better. I will make the old woman happy, and therefore fit to live. Old woman,' he exclaimed, 'let me beg you to consider this. You are yourself by your own unhappiness expiating your son's sins. Do but think of that, and you will become unspeakably happy.'

Meanwhile, however, the old woman had died. When the Professor discovered this he was somewhat shocked; but at length with a sudden change of countenance, 'We neither of us did it,' he exclaimed; 'her death is no act of ours. It is part of the eternal not-ourselves that makes for righteousness—righteousness, which is, as we all know, but another name for happiness. Let us adore the event with reverence.'

'Yes,' said the curate, 'we are well rid of her. She was an immoral old woman, for happiness is the test of morality, and she was very unhappy.'

'On the contrary,' said the Professor, 'she was a moral old woman; for she has made us happy by dying so very opportunely. Let us speak well of the dead. Her death has been a holy and a blessed one. She has conformed to the laws of matter. Thus is unhappiness destined to fade out of the world. Quick! let us tie a bag of shot to all the sorrow and evil of Humanity, which, after all, is only a fourth part of it, and let us sink her in the bay close at hand, that she may catch lobsters for us.'

CHAPTER IX.

At last,' said the Professor, as they began dinner that evening, 'the fulness of time has come. All the evils of Humanity are removed, and progress has come to an end because it can go no further. We have nothing now to do but to be unspeakably and significantly happy.'

The champagne flowed freely. Our friends ate and drank of the best, their spirits rose, and Virginia admitted that this was really 'jolly.' The sense of the word pleased the Professor, but its sound seemed below the gravity of the occasion; so he begged her to say 'sublime' instead. 'We can make it mean,' he said, 'just the same, but we prefer it for the sake of its associations.'

It soon, however, occurred to him that eating and drinking were hardly delights sufficient to justify the highest state of human emotion, and he began to fear he had been feeling sublime prematurely; but in another moment he recollected he was an altruist, and that the secret of their happiness was not that any one of them was happy, but that they each knew the others were.

'Yes, my dear curate,' said the Professor, 'what I am enjoying is the champagne that you drink, and what you are enjoying is the champagne that I drink. This is altruism; this is benevolence; this is the sublime outcome of enlightened modern thought. The pleasures of the table, in themselves, are low and beastly ones; but if we each of us are only glad because the others are enjoying them, they become holy and glorious beyond description.'

'They do,' cried the curate rapturously, 'indeed they do. I will drink another bottle for your sake. It is sublime!' he said, as he tossed off three glasses. 'It is significant!' he said as he finished three more. 'Tell me, my dear, do I look significant?' he added, as he turned to Virginia, and suddenly tried, to crown the general bliss by kissing her.

Virginia started back, looking fire and fury at him. The Professor was completely astounded by an occurrence so unnatural, and exclaimed in a voice of thunder, 'Morality, sir—remember morality! How dare you upset that which Professor Huxley tells us must be for ever strong enough to hold its own?'

But the last glass of champagne had put the curate beyond the reach of exact thought. He tumbled under the table, and the Professor carried him off to bed.

CHAPTER X.

The Professor, like most serious thinkers, knew but little of that trifle commonly called 'the world.' He had never kissed any one except his wife; even that he did as seldom as possible; and the curate lying dead drunk was the first glimpse he had of what, par excellence, is described as 'life.' But though the scene just recounted was thus a terrible shock to him, in one way it gave him an unlooked-for comfort. He had felt that even yet things were not quite as sublime as they should be. He now saw the reason. 'Of course,' he said, 'existence cannot be perfect so long as one third of Humanity makes a beast of itself. A little more progress must be still necessary.'

He hastened to explain this next morning to Virginia, and begged her not to be alarmed at the curate's scandalous conduct. 'Immorality,' he said, 'is but a want of success in attaining our own happiness. It is evidently most immoral for the curate to be kissing you; and therefore kissing you would not really conduce to his happiness. I will convince him of this solemn truth in a very few moments. Then the essential dignity of human nature will become at once apparent, and we shall all of us at last begin to be unspeakably happy.'

The curate, however, altogether