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for the living. Some there are, however, among these mortals, "whose ears are open to the voice of truth, and whose vision is purged to see the things of human life in their real aspect." Charon would read his lesson, then, to them. "That would be labour lost," replies Mercury, "to teach them what they know well already. See how they sit apart from the vulgar herd, smiling at all that passes, and feeling never any kind of satisfaction in it: but plainly meditating an escape to your quiet regions, out of the weariness of life; hated, moreover, as they are by their fellows, because they seek to convict them of their folly." "These seem but few," says Charon. "They are enough," replies Mercury. Enough to be the salt of the earth; such, even in the heathen’s estimate, must always be few. And cynicism and suicide,—these, as we see, were the heathen's remedies for the vanity and vexation of life.