Braden Thorpe had spent two years in the New York hospitals, after graduation from Johns Hopkins, and had been sent to Germany and Austria by his grandfather when he was twenty-seven, to work under the advanced scientists of Vienna and Berlin.

At twenty-nine he came back to New York, a serious-minded, purposeful man, wrapped up in his profession and heterodoxically humane, to use the words of his grandfather.

The first day after his return he confided to his grim old relative the somewhat unprofessional opinion that hopelessly afflicted members of the human race should be put out of their misery by attending physicians, operating under the direction of a commission appointed to consider such cases, and that the act should be authorised by law! His grandfather, being seventy-six and apparently as healthy as any one could hope to be at that age, said that he thought it would be just as well to kill 'em legally as any other way, having no good opinion of doctors, and admitted that his grandson had an exceptionally soft heart in him even though his head was a trifle harder and thicker than was necessary in one so young.
"It's worth thinking about, anyhow, isn't it, granddaddy ?" Braden had said, with great earnestness.
"It is, my boy," said Templeton Thorpe; "especially when you haven't got anything serious the matter with you." "But if you were hopelessly ill and suffering beyond all endurance you'd welcome death, wouldn't you ?" "No, I wouldn't," said Mr.Thorpe promptly.

"The only time I ever wanted to shuffle off was when your grandmother first refused to marry me.

The second time she refused me I decided to do something almost but not quite so terrible, so I went West.