suppose, after all, you arrive too late, and find the inhabitants with their throats cut and the village in ruins—why should you mind? You know it does not matter a straw whether the villagers’ throats are cut or not cut; all that matters is how they behaved in the hour of death. Mr. Bevan, whose studies of the Stoics and Sceptics form a rare compound of delicate learning and historical imagination, says that the attitude of the Stoic in a case like this is like that of a messenger boy sent to deliver a parcel to someone, with instructions to try various addresses in order to find him. The good messenger boy will go duly to all the addresses, but if the addressee is not to be found at any of them what does that matter to the messenger boy? He has
