Following Conductor Prigge's instructions, I presented myself at six o'clock in the evening at the entrance to the Great University of Mecco. It was the first time I had been out without my 'keeper,' but as everybody else was dressed in the Meccanian costume, whilst I was wearing the clothes I had been accustomed to wear in Luniland and Francaria, there was little risk of my going astray. A porter darted out of a box in the entrance hall and directed me to Room 415, where the Professor of Historical Culture was to deliver his monthly four-hour lecture to Foreign Observers. I found about a dozen Foreign Observers of various nationalities waiting in the small lecture-room, and presently a few more arrived. Some were Scandinavians, some South Americans; a few, I thought, were Turks; several were from some part of India. At 6.10 precisely the Professor came in. He wore a brilliant yellow uniform of the Third Class, with green facings and buttons and a number of little ribbons indicating, I suppose, various services rendered to the cause of Meccanian Culture. Apart from his dress he resembled the caricatures of Meccanian professors in our comic prints. His head was bald on the top and at the front, but at the sides great tufts of white hair protruded. His grey beard was of ample proportions. His coarse wizened face and staring eyes, covered by a pair of huge spectacles, gave him the appearance of a Jack-in-the-box as he sat behind a high reading-desk. His voice was tough and leathery. At the end of three hours it sounded as fresh and as harsh as in the opening sentences. I cannot reproduce the whole lecture; if I did it would almost fill a book by itself. I can only hope to give a rough idea of it by paraphrasing some of the most salient passages. He began by saying that to accommodate himself to the culture of his foreign auditors he would endeavour to present his subject in the simplest possible form, which was the narrative, and would sketch the biography of the great re-founder of the Meccanian State, the true architect of the First Super-State in the world, the greatest political creative genius that had ever stepped upon the World Stage, Prince Mechow. We had all seen his memorial statue, a unique monument to a unique individual, and no doubt it had made an impression upon our imagination; but it was impossible for any work of art however great--and here he paid a tribute to the hero-artist who built the monument--to convey more than a symbolical suggestion of the all-embracing magnificence of Prince Mechow's truly Meccanian personality. For that we must look around at the Super-State itself.