and said “modified,” and let it go—­“has profoundly Modified our view of death.  In superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of life, catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often surrounded by solemnity.  Brighter days, however, have dawned, and we now see death as universal and inevitable, as part of that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding average which we call for convenience the order of nature.  In the same way we have come to consider murder socially.  Rising above the mere private feelings of a man while being forcibly deprived of life, we are privileged to behold murder as a mighty whole, to see the rich rotation of the cosmos, bringing, as it brings the golden harvests and the golden-bearded harvesters, the return for ever of the slayers and the slain.”

He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed slightly, putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent manners of Boston, and continued:  “There is but one result of this happier and humaner outlook which concerns the wretched man before us.  It is that thoroughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor, our great secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in his great work, `The Destructive Type.’  We do not denounce Smith as a murderer, but rather as a murderous man.  The type is such that its very life—­ I might say its very health—­is in killing.  Some hold that it is not properly an aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature.  My dear old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets—­” (here Moon suddenly ejaculated a loud “hurrah!” but so instantaneously resumed his tragic expression that Mrs. Duke looked everywhere else for the sound); Dr. Pym continued somewhat sternly—­“who, in the interests of knowledge, kept ferrets, felt that the creature’s ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an end in itself.  However this may be with ferrets, it is certainly so with the prisoner.  In his other iniquities you may find the cunning of the maniac; but his acts of blood have almost the simplicity of sanity.  But it is the awful sanity of the sun and the elements—­a cruel, an evil sanity.  As soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin West as stay the natural force that sends him forth to slay.  No environment, however scientific, could have softened him.  Place that man in the silver-silent purity of the palest cloister, and there will be some deed of violence done with the crozier or the alb.  Rear him in a happy nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy, and he will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope or brain with the brick.  Circumstances may be favourable, training may be admirable, hopes may be high, but the huge elemental hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will in its appointed season burst like a well-timed bomb.”

Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature at the foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked hat, and then looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter tone.