Learning, in a loftier sense than we understand the term; art, music and all the senses of physical and mental enjoyment, and the promotion of all of them, are pitched in a high and harmonious key. Personal adornment and physical beauty in both sexes have no tinge of vanity, and awake no envy in others. Intermerean dress and its adjuncts are as closely looked after as their wonderful mechanism and its mysterious soul or motor-spirit, which enables them to travel with celerity and safety by land or air or sea, or that subtler principle by which men and women, separated by distance, talk to each other by thought instead of speech, and would render the clumsy deception of our own diplomats and other hypocrites an impossibility. The clothing of the Intermereans, wrought from native materials not wholly unlike, except an to quality, those utilized by other peoples, is of a texture and finish beyond the conception of the outer world, and of such colors and combinations of tints as to breathe, as it were, both art and aptitude. The garments of both sexes more nearly resemble those in Europe and America than any others, and yet they are very unlike in striking points. Speaking of this similitude, I may say that the polity and institutions, and mental and physical characteristics of the people who live under them, more nearly resemble those of America than of any other nation or people. But at that, how wide and deep and apparently impassable is the gulf that separates them. Ours is but the faint promise; theirs the fulfillment of the completed prophecy. Did we start on the journey? Have we halted just beyond the first milestone? Will the journey be resumed? Will our remoter generations reach the Ultima Thule? What splendid hope or what illimitable despair and misery depend upon the Sphinx's answer to these questions! While Intermere is not sown with diamonds and pearls and precious stones and metals, they were to be seen in profusion everywhere, not as matters of garish display, but of artistic taste. I doubt not that the Intermereans, through their successful study of Nature, possess the Philosopher's Stone, capable of combining and transmuting every substance into the riches for which men die and women sacrifice more than life, and nations crush nations, and peoples destroy peoples, gathering the Dead Sea fruits that turn to bitter ashes on their lips. These people place no more commercial value upon these than they do upon the tints of the rainbow, or the purple haze that hangs like a halo above the mountain tops. To them they are but artistic types of beauty that add to life's true enjoyments.