act and scene was faithfully reproduced as loud or as low as I desired. I had but to touch a certain spring in the historoscope, and raise or lower the tone. It was little wonder that we so rapidly covered the history of the family and its achievements. By means of the work of former students we were able to avoid all the mistakes and unessential details of the route they had traversed; and Thyriel’s friends pointed out every pitfall that edged the road, every by-path that led only into the darkness or into some inextricable labyrinth. Our steps were watched with infinite care; for, with all the knowledge and skill we had already acquired, we were but infants on the threshold of a universe of darkness. What was twilight in the future to our guides was to us midnight blackness. That was no science, they held, which did not flash light upon the gloom before us; and their whole efforts were bent on turning every fact and law into a prophecy and every student into a foreseer as well as a seer in his own science. The limited faculties of man fenced in by narrow bounds the future into which it was possible for them to see; but they were ever extending these bounds and creeping towards the infinite. It took but a few years to master the recorded lore of the Leomo, the work of our predecessors had made it so easy, and it was an epoch in our existence when we began the practical part of our training. We were by no means done with Fialume, but less time was now devoted to its historical and theoretical studies. I well remember the morning when our guardians and guides informed us we were fit to see the practical applications of the science throughout the island. Taking some new apparatus, they embarked me in a kind of faleena which had been invented since I came to the island. The families of imagination had long ago suggested it, and one of the families engaged in the development of methods of flight had just succeeded in perfecting its mechanism and making it easy to manage. This aërial car had no wings, but rose by means of the many vacuum tubes which were the most important part of its impelling machinery. A powerful electric engine created and destroyed the vacuums many hundred times a minute. Each tube sucked in the air ahead and expelled it with great violence at the stern of the car. Both actions aided in propelling the faleena. The result was that, though not so graceful as the old winged car, it went with much greater swiftness. Indeed, laden though we were, we kept pace easily with the flight of my companions and guides through the air; and its parachute attachments obviated any risk, even if all the tubes should by accident become ineffective. Its chief disadvantage was that it could not rise out of the denser air of the lower atmosphere, and at the same time keep up its great speed. The old style of faleena, or farfaleena, as it was called, to distinguish it from its new rival,