the most disagreeable phenomena of modern times. But yesterday, it seems, the limitations imposed upon mechanically-driven road vehicles were grudgingly withdrawn; but to-day, as it were, the motorist has developed from the diffident, apologetic and carefully considerate licensee of the morning to the overbearing insensate Juggernaut of the afternoon. Somehow, during that brief interval, he has managed to give currency to the fiction that the roads are not for pedestrians in the first instance, and that foot passengers are to regard themselves as traversing them on sufferance alone. We have lived actually to hear the true Juggernaut opinion many times expressed that children, choosing to wander into the highways and byways, must look to nothing more than the good nature, or latent humanity, of motorists to spare their lives. To that have we come-or returned. It is like the prohibition again to all below a certain class to carry arms abroad; it is like eighteenth century Paris, where in winter the sleds of the wealthy were used to rush by the narrow ways, with no forewarning but the tinkle of their bells to Jacques Sansculotte and his ragged imps, who, unless they could dodge behind a corner or tumble into some sewer of a doorway, were like to be crushed against the walls or trodden underfoot. One, it is true, had hardly looked for this sort of reaction in England, but it serves for the significant and melancholy reminder that the progressive humanity of any age is never more than the leaven of the few very good and strong in a bad world.

Or else are there physiologic reasons for this speed craze? It might almost appear indeed to be due to a germ, like Russian influenza, and perhaps appendicitis, so strangely has it seized, and comparatively in a moment, on the constitution of the world. Fifty years ago it was not, or had not passed beyond

the bounds of reasonable development. To-day it enters into every detail of our life as we live it. To have any time on one's hands is to be intolerably afflicted. To speak a fully equipped sentence is to be accused of unbearable redundancy. The prolix bore of this morning was last week's epigrammatist. We must coin the blessed minutes into pence as we run; our mental aliment must be bolted in paragraphs, and our physical in tabloids. Where leisure once lent a studied grace to correspondence, a flying scrawl excuses X, Y or Z, fluttering in the midst of a swarm of petty distractions, for a delayed courtesy. A thousand expedients must be contrived for condensing and abbreviating the business of our existence, and the terms in which that business is conveyed. Bike, 'bus, tram., pram., tube, are some of our staccato vehicles; we snap snippets and rapid lunches gives us indi. Even in endeavoring to reproduce the atmosphere of the spacious deliberate times we must Padge. for short. Verily, if I had my way, I would make this clipping of the currency as indictable an offence as false-coining.

It is our modern vulgar interpretation of fast living, as the physical speed-itch, the cacoëthes currendi, is our insane. Let us get on, get on, get on! Whither?

We don't know, only let us get on somehow and somewhere-use up the hours, cover the old earth by leaps and bounds, exhaust its potentialities with all possible speed, and then

Well, what then? What are we going to do for a new world, when we have sucked this one dry and thrown away the rind. Yesterday I came across a picture, in some weekly illustrated paper, of a gentleman, an American gentleman, being shaved, and holding a telephone to his mouth and ear the while. There was an economy of time! Smart fellow, that;

likely to "get on," and "do" his world right away. In a year or two, what he don't know about it won't, in the vernacular of his race, be worth knowing.

With these thoughts in my mind, and that picture in my mind's eye, I went to keep a night appointment with Professor Kingsgate. You know him for the distinguished scientist and astronomer-one of those modern Atlases who support the heavens on their shoulders. He has probed further into the cosmic geography than most travellers into Tartary. He began to think, where the ordinary intellect sets the limit to its excogitations. He handles worlds as a grocer will currants, weighing them to the nicest scruple. He is the man who will roll a system round his neck as it might be a comforter; who will hang a comet on his umbrella for a tassel; who will put Saturn's ring on the little finger of his left hand, and that in his trousers pocket, while with his right hand finger-nail he will trace you a canal on Mars. He walks briskly, kicking up stellar dust; and, if a beggar importune him for a trifle, will raise his stick to the skies, and hook him down a planet as indifferently as it should be a golden pippin. And he smokes a pipe like any lesser man; that is a fact which never ceases to astonish and reassure me. For it seems to speak a contentment, on the part of the ultimate human wisdom, with the leisurely features of a world, whose glad surprises and recurrent sensations of pleasure the major and meaner swarms of us are in such an insane hurry to use up and cast behind.

The Professor enjoys life; you cannot see him and doubt it. When he showed me, through his telescope, the moon-a white sugary thing, pitted with a multitude of little pock-marks— there was a sub-conscious vision in my mind of the man himself, in seaside lodgings, cutting out infinite intricate

patterns in paper to amuse my little girl; playing golf on the sand-dunes; appearing at a children's dance for the mere enjoyment of the sight. So, when he told me that these marks were all so many extinct volcanoes, my vision of Shelley's "orbéd maiden with whitefire laden" received no shock from the knowledge, but was merely translated into terms of ætiology by one who was certainly no whit behind me in a sentimental mundane view of things. For romance is a conscious lie only to those who lack the sense of proportion; and a pit or a pore-we have Gulliver's word for it is a purely relative expression. We know how he regarded at close quarters the skins of the Brobdingnagian ladies; but none of us of to-day is ever likely, unless by way of a telescope, to approach near enough to the moon to criticise her complexion; and, indeed, if Sir George Darwin is to be believed, a cycle or two will see us appreciably further from her.

Now, on subsequent occasions, the gist of the Professor's exercitations, at least as they affected me, appeared to embody nothing less than the moral of existence, as common-sensible people should be ready to accept it. Wherefore, having a normally limited understanding, and no official correspondence, so to speak, with spheres outside my own, was I moved there and then to the wise resolution to anchor my reason to the world we live in, since just beyond its limits, where atmosphere ends, begins madness. And the source of this decision lay in a vain endeavor on my part to think in the continents of numbers necessary to the loosest appreciation of an overwhelming truth, the substance of whichbarring a reckless approximation of figures-had presented itself as follows:

Our own little system embraces a circumference of (say) twenty-four hundred millions of miles. We are a

pigmy system at that. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, countless thousands of thousands of other systems, no doubt, embrace each its circumference of miles, less, or incalculably more, and everyone separated from its neighbor groups by distances which baffle the imagination. Consider, now, that the entire firmament, visible to mortal sight through the extremes of mortal ingenuity, is not immutably stationed, but is itself sweeping onwardwhether in a straight line through infinity, or tracing in space a stupendous circle at the rate of some five hundred thousand miles a day; consider that this visible firmament may be only one of an indefinite and endless succession of firmaments; consider, finally, as you can, the question of infinity itself and, then, having considered, be wise, like me, and think no more, but settle back, with a grateful sigh, upon this poor little abused world of ours, upon which all our hopes, our wonders, our sufficient interests, loves and affections are centred. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety," to those who, like myself, accept time for their most priceless prerogative, and have no desire to anticipate the ages, to exhaust the sources of wonder, or to be absorbed, like a squirrel in a wheel, into the wild circumambulation of a globe which, for all their mortal uses, is the only one they can ever hope to possess.

Whither, indeed, do we suppose, that all this desperate hurry is carrying us -this limitless speed, this nightmare of winged vehicles, this tendency to recoin all our verbal currency into threepenny bits? There was a day when woman was on the side of Time; when she loved and could not have too much of him; when she loitered with him, like Vesta, in the green woods of Ida, and found her full content in his leisured philandering. Now her fondness is changed to enmity; all her ingenuity

is devoted to a thousand curious ways of killing him; like Cleopatra she experiments on him with subtle poisons, and holds him for her slave who was once her master. There was a day, again, when men planted avenues for posterity; now they can only be moved reluctantly to reafforestation in their Own interests. There was a day, finally, when language was a studied

art:

Praise enough

To fill the ambition of a private man, That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue.

Great

To-day it has been left to a President of the United States to give his vast mind to a calculation of the monetary saving to the world in a scheme of phonetic spelling. The saving! Mammon! And what of the loss, if you please, Mr. Roosevelt? But that is by the way; and in the meantime we are clipping our currency in a fashion that would certainly meet with your progressive approval. To-day I bought a nosegay of daffs. from a flower-girl, on my way from ordering some yards of lino. from an upholsterer, who'incidentally had offered me a piece of furniture which he said was genuine old Chip.

The monetary saving, good sooth! Logically, it comes to this, exchange three syllables for one, a word for a snap, a snap for nothing at all, and presently you will be rich. The lamented Mr. Merriman's strong silent man, who only looked his thoughts, will be the plutocrat of the future.

Here is a trifling list of some abbreviations of Chatham's language as they occur to me:

Specs, turps., pants., mag., topper, Co., fiver, gent., cert., Jap., perks, prep., math., impot., rugger, soccer, footer, 'varsity, Deb-soc. (which your informant is told signifieth Debating Society). Cri., Troc., Pav., Cat., &c., &c.; to

which may be added all the signs, symbols, and titular suffixes, which I find, in Messrs. Chambers's dictionary, to run to some fourteen hundred in number. That may be admitted to represent in bulk, a fair economy of time; but it is nothing to what we are to look for in the future, when, the world explored to its minutest wrinkle, we shall have nothing whatever left to talk about but the happy old days, when IGNORANCE, in the largest capitals, still kept some undiscovered fields and pastures for imagination to browse on.

The

I was reading lately a book by Mr. Wells called When the Sleeper Wakes. It is an uncomfortable book, full of acute reasoning and savage prophecy; full, also, for our partial comfort, of that quality of imagination which, once launched, abandons itself to the magnificence of its own chimeras. chimeras, it must be said, nevertheless, evolve on logical lines; the question is only one of their development. Too startlingly rapid, one would fain hope. In Mr. Wells's eyes, or the eyes of his awakened Cataleptic, two hundred years, dating from the present, have been enough to transform the whole world into one monstrous tyranny of trusts-a tyranny made possible by an unprecedented accumulation of capital, commanding an absolute monopoly of the mechanical sciences, old and new, and a merciless employment, one must suppose, of that system of "linkingsup." of which we heard so much in a recent diatribe on the Chicago stockyards. Flying-machines are in foremost evidence, of course, centralization has depleted the entire earth to the gain of the dozen or so bloated cities, into whose enormous congested veins the life and substance of all things are drawn; the myriads toil to procure their unnamable luxuries for the few. The few-that is it. The tendency of all cataclysmic hurry is to compact itself about a centre, and the faster we

race, the better for the handful of keen worldly intelligences that know how to take advantage of, and direct and concentrate the confusion. Who can deny a certain inevitableness in the picture? That way are things running, if at less break-neck speed than in the imagination of the seer. Yet, who can tell? This book was published, I think, some eight or ten years ago. To-day the aëroplane is an accomplished fact, and the world, the supine world of curiosity, only waits to see how it is going to be "exploited." Trusts, at least in America (which we are fondly bid to hail for the pioneer of the new order), are so ineradicable an institution that, if its Jeremiahs are to be believed, its Norrises, its Sinclairs, its Churchills, there is scarcely an upright judge, director, official of any sort to be found in all the length and breadth of its thirty-odd States. Granted that these men do not romance, is it credible that this huge continental tumor can go on swelling and festering, and not affect, through its arteries of commerce, the general constitution of the world? The poison, indeed, is already amongst us. Ten per cent. rules our monosyllabic morals, and the voice of the plutocrat is heard in the land. I don't know, I am sure, if it is yet possible for us to talk with Liverpool while being shaved in London; but if it is not, it is going to be. In the old days fast-living was accounted a vice; in these it is so much an economic necessity that our moral sense has ceased to rebuke it, and the social institutions, age-long founded on human needs and amenities, are losing their hold.

Yet they were good institutions, and one can foresee nothing but moral bankruptcy in their loss. It is possible to be too clever, too up-to-date. For all the fond and earnest inquiries of the psychists, we are no nearer a true knowledge of this disembodied personality than we have ever been since