Thus at last there came the supreme moment that I had laboured for. I was to be permitted to visit Fialume. I shall never forget the day. I had swept out of my mind analogies for their great graveyard from the doleful surroundings of death to which I had been accustomed in my native land, the long train of mourners, the ghastly hearse with its burden of mortality, the unkempt grass of the place of tombs, the dreary wait beneath the unsympathetic sky; and then the rattle of the clods upon the coffin-lid, and the frantic effort to drive from the soul the thought of the gradual corruption of the body and the final residue of skull and bones. Years though I had been in Limanora, I had never heard of a funeral. Indeed deaths were as rare as births in a community that had striven to avoid the lavish waste of nature, and had so studied the human frame as to know how to arrest decay of its powers and to give every individual full possibility of developing himself and through himself his race. The reckless and indiscriminate bearings and dyings of the old world were no advance on the course of the animal or even the vegetable sphere; the higher the organisation the fewer the young and the greater the care of them. But man in other lands had still, with all his thought and foresight, the extravagant method of nature, and had increased and multiplied without stint in order that an occasional exception might help by favouring conditions to lead the race onwards and perhaps upwards. Thousands of Alexanders and Cromwells, of Mahomets and Socrates, of Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares had lived and died unknown, because they had not been born into the circumstances which fitted their peculiar faculties. This people had seen that the method of nature was haphazard, if not heartless, that the rate of progress could be indefinitely accelerated if every child that was born were born with a definite purpose, and his life were guarded and extended till that purpose was fulfilled. They meant every act of generation for a definite advance. Birth and death were in the hands of the race and not of chance, and thus it was that I had never seen or heard of obsequies during the many years of my probation. So my difficulties were solved by my guardians before we set out for the national place of tombs. Yet my curiosity was as active as before. This was the beginning of a new epoch in my new life. How could its wonders surpass those of the past years! And I was all eagerness to study the past history of this noble race, to study the gradual ascent to the height they had now reached.