Death, to him, was the blackness of unbroken sleep; and yet, during his years in Jerusalem, he was ever vexed with the inescapable fuss and fury of things religious.
Why, I had a horse-boy on my trip into Idumaea, a wretched creature that could never learn to saddle and who yet could talk, and most learnedly, without breath, from nightfall to sunrise, on the hair-splitting differences in the teachings of all the rabbis from Shemaiah to Gamaliel.
But to return to Miriam.
"You believe you are immortal," she was soon challenging me.

"Then why do you fear to talk about it ?" "Why burden my mind with thoughts about certainties ?" I countered.
"But are you certain ?" she insisted.

"Tell me about it.

What is it like--your immortality ?" And when I had told her of Niflheim and Muspell, of the birth of the giant Ymir from the snowflakes, of the cow Andhumbla, and of Fenrir and Loki and the frozen Jotuns--as I say, when I had told her of all this, and of Thor and Odin and our own Valhalla, she clapped her hands and cried out, with sparkling eyes: "Oh, you barbarian! You great child! You yellow giant-thing of the frost! You believer of old nurse tales and stomach satisfactions! But the spirit of you, that which cannot die, where will it go when your body is dead ?" "As I have said, Valhalla," I answered.

"And my body shall be there, too." "Eating ?--drinking ?--fighting ?" "And loving," I added.