The question, I suppose, is as old as humanity.  And the answer is old too, and has always, I fancy, resembled that of our little group round the smoking-room fire.  It is a question that does not present itself until we are middle-aged, for the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, and life then stretches out in such an interminable vista as to raise no question of its recurrence.  It is when you have reached the top of the pass and are on the downward slope, with the evening shadows falling over the valley and the church tower and with the end of the journey in view, that the question rises unbidden to the lips.  The answer does not mean that the journey has not been worth while.  It only means that the way has been long and rough, that we are footsore and tired, and that the thought of rest is sweet.  It is nature’s way of reconciling us to our common lot.  She has shown her child all the pageant of life, and now prepares him for his “patrimony of a little mould”—­

      Thou hast made his mouth
    Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
    All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
    All beauty, and all starry majesties,
    And dim transtellar things;—­even that it may,
    Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
    Confess—­“It is enough.”

Yes, it is enough.  We accept the verdict of mortality uncomplainingly—­nay, we would not wish it to be reversed, even if that were possible.

Now this question must not be confounded with that other, rather foolish, question, “Is Life worth living?” The group round the smoking-room fire would have answered that question—­if they had troubled to answer it at all—­with an instant and scornful “Yes.”  They had all found life a great and splendid adventure; they had made good and wholesome use of it; they would not surrender a moment of its term or a fragment of its many-coloured experience.  And that is the case with all healthy-minded people.  We may, like Job, in moments of depression curse the day when we were born; but the curse dies on our lips.  Swift, it is true, kept his birthday as a day of mourning; but no man who hates humanity can hope to find life endurable, for the measure of our sympathies is the measure of our joy in living.

Even those who take the most hopeless view of life are careful to keep out of mischief.  A friend of mine told me recently of a day he had spent with a writer famous for the sombre philosophy of his books.  In the morning the writer declared that no day ever passed in which he did not wish that he had never been born; in the afternoon he had a most excellent opportunity of being drowned through some trouble with a sailing boat, and he rejected the chance with almost pathetic eagerness.  Yet I daresay he went on believing that he wished he had never been born.  It is not only the children who live in the world of “Let us make pretend.”