“If the world knew that the mother-in-law is a rarer bird in Hades than a political blackbird hanging over both sides of the fence under the plum tree, the earth would be depopulated faster by that news than by the Oslerized process. Charon would have to charter all the world’s warships for transports and each man in Hades would have to make a jack o’ lantern of his skull to prevent being run down by the crowd of onrushing shades. Hades would no longer be a country of suburban cottages but a Hell of Harlem flats.”
“We are wandering farther away from the subject under discussion than any convention of preachers I ever knew,” said David. “Isn’t it about time we had a text? I would suggest: ‘And Saul took the sword and fell upon it.’”
“You see I didn’t have Dr. Osler for a medical adviser,” explained Saul. “In my day, when we wanted to shorten the duration of our stay on that planet called the earth, we cut it. Methinks an opiate would have deadened the edge of the sword when I walked the plank.”
“Dr. Osler has gone me one better,” said David. “He has revised the Psalms to read: The days of a man are two score years, and if, by reason of any extraordinary fund of vitality, he shall linger around until he is three score without the ten, he had better get a hustle on and remove himself, for he is in the way of some one else.”
“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.”