When we had taken a comprehensive view of Fialume, we entered another faleena, which had been substituted for our disabled car. We shot farewell glances at Oolmo and were off in the air before I had well disentangled my thoughts from the last sight. Below us receded the massive archways of the door and the foaming streams at the entrance of the valley. The jubilant music began to grow dim, and the dome shone softly in the colours of the sunset. I thought we were to be alone on our return journey, and began to question Thyriel on some of the mysteries of the day. She had not much light to throw on them, for she was herself a novice in life. But of a sudden like a flock of homing pigeons a band of our comrades broke out into the level sunlight from the mouth of Fialume; and along with them other bands that streamed east and north and south. Before long the western train had overtaken us, and their voices rang like carolling at heaven’s gate. They saw our faleena land in safety at the house of my proparents, and then, joined by Thyriel, they streamed away through the twilight sky, ever breaking off into more and more widely separated groups till they were lost across the horizon, or in the darkness of some distant valley. Week after week, and at last day after day, we took our path through the azure to Fialume. For several years under the direction of Oolmo we became acquainted with the history of Limanora, and saw the gradual development of the civilisation and of the human form and faculty. We came to feel how naturally ends followed means chosen in the mind and frame of man, as in the plant creation and in the other animals. We saw how creative had been this community, not in the arts merely, but in that art of all arts, human nature. They had moulded generation after generation to higher and ever higher purpose. How poor and subsidiary seemed all the sciences when compared with this great practical science, the knowledge to mould man into any required form, to bend his energies ever upwards! Every week there grew upon us the consciousness that there was no more plastic material in the whole world than the human soul, when it had reached a certain stage of development. Oolmo traced for us each new faculty and power and virtue to its starting-point, and showed us how feeble it was to begin with, and how rapidly it grew when once artificial effort was turned upon it. At first it was the physical powers that he drew our attention to; in family after family, for example, he showed us how the capacity of flight had been acquired, and how the human frame had gradually become adapted to it; the body grew lighter, the shoulder and breast muscles stronger, the bones hollower, the arms longer, and the legs shorter, with greater strength at the heels.