We entered the gloomy porch and passed into the central hall; it was almost the exact counterpart of Terralona, except that there was no brilliant suggestion of all that was beautiful and noble. There was the same dim suffusion of light, the same lofty wall of lenses with rests, the same series of flight platforms round the other walls. With some precipitancy I made for one of the optic rounds in the wall, and the first sight I saw struck me as the most commonplace and familiar. It was a representation of one of the foul lanes of our Western cities. There were the gutter children, the reeling drunkards issuing from the gin palaces, the cursing drabs behind them, the tatters, the filth, the dilapidated buildings. It was but an unending series of instantaneous photographs moving with great speed under stereoscopic glasses, whilst the sounds accompanying the scene, having impressed themselves similarly on long strips of irelium, were in one of their sound machines reproducing themselves. It was indeed the commonest and most repulsive of sights in the east end of any of our large towns. What astonished me was that it should have been taken from European life; and yet, when I gazed more attentively at it and put the sound-magnifier to my ears, I knew that it was not European. The words spoken were in a language I did not know, and the rags of the men and women were the rags of a national costume I did not recognise. I shifted my rest and lens, and I saw a rustic village, such as I had known in my boyhood, with the toilers busy at their work. At a distance it was a happy scene; for the men and women were absorbed in occupation and seemed to have forgotten the evils of mankind. They were much in the open air, which was bright with the colours of the sunlight; and the children’s voices sounded merry at play or humming like bees from the window of the schoolhouse. It was a picture such as city poets had often painted as ideal and primitive happiness, yet some contrivance seemed to analyse it all for my mind and reveal to me that it was even more repulsive than that of the foul city lane. Not to my hearing or my eyes did this come; but to my magnetic sense, ill-developed though it was. I felt a deadly stupor over the whole pressing out the higher life of every rustic. Not the diseases which often overtook them unprovided, not the poverty leaving no outlook for their old age except reluctant and hated charity, not the constant slavery of toil, or the meagre assuagement of its woes by a weekly booze in the tavern, weighed upon my spirit and made me sad to look at the scene. It was the stagnant spiritual level on which they and their children to the thousandth generation must live, without power of perceiving the nobleness that was above them and around them, without the chance of ever developing the spiritual energy that was in them, without one approach to the line of infinite progress going on throughout the universe. To stand still