Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth CenturyDonnelly, Ignatius
Science
Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century
Donnelly, Ignatius
Dystopias -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Social problems -- Fiction; Twentieth century -- Fiction
of feeling that they are nothing, they become nothing.
I must bring this letter to an end, but before retiring I shall make
a visit to the grand parlors of the hotel. You suppose I will walk
there. Not at all, my dear brother. I shall sit down in a chair;
there is an electric magazine in the seat of it. I touch a spring,
and away it goes. I guide it with my feet. I drive into one of the
great elevators. I descend to the drawing-room floor. I touch the
spring again, and in a few moments I am moving around the grand
salon, steering myself clear of hundreds of similar chairs, occupied
by fine-looking men or the beautiful, keen-eyed, unsympathetic women
I have described. The race has grown in power and loveliness--I fear
it has lost in lovableness.
Good-by. With love to all, I remain your affectionate brotherly
Gabriel Weltstein.
CHAPTER II.
MY ADVENTURE
My Dear Heinrich:
I little supposed when I wrote you yesterday that twenty four hours
could so completely change my circumstances. Then I was a dweller in
the palatial Darwin Hotel, luxuriating in all its magnificence. Now I
am hiding in a strange house and trembling for my liberty;--but I
will tell you all.
Yesterday morning, after I had disposed by sample of our wool, and
had called upon the assayer of ores, but without finding him, to show
him the specimens of our mineral discoveries, I returned to the
hotel, and there, after obtaining directions from one of the clerks
at the "Bureau of Information," I took the elevated train to the
great Central Park.
I shall not pause to describe at length the splendors of this
wonderful place; the wild beasts roaming about among the trees,
apparently at dangerous liberty, but really inclosed by fine steel
wire fences, almost invisible to the eye; the great lakes full of the
different water fowl of the world; the air thick with birds
distinguished for the sweetness of their song or the brightness of
their plumage; the century-old trees, of great size and artistically
grouped; beautiful children playing upon the greensward, accompanied
by nurses and male servants; the whole scene constituting a holiday
picture. Between the trees everywhere I saw the white and gleaming
statues of the many hundreds of great men and women who have adorned
the history of this country during the last two hundred years--poets,
painters, musicians, soldiers, philanthropists, statesmen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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