This is the story that Melinda told me as the clock struck midnight and the new year rolled in over the quiet campus:

It was the 1830s, and I was living in the Lake District of England. A beautiful place, ripe with poetry and poets. I was only a little over two hundred years old, and I was wrestling, I think for the first time, with the fact of immortality; that I would live on many lifetimes while the world passed by around me. I was determined to continue to see and ...