Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles hurling into stations, catching trains by a hair's breadth, speeding on their way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce accuracy out upon the platforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles, into dispersing parcels, into separate papers. The dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys, a shoving through letter-slots, openings of windows, spreading out upon book-stalls. For the space of a few hours, you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling papers. Placards everywhere vociferate the hurried lie for the day. Men and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by study fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for father to finish--a million scattered people are reading--reading headlong--or feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land. Nonsense! The whole affair is a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength--signifying nothing. --From H. G. Wells "In the Days of the Comet." [Illustration] A VISIT TO SING SING. By A MORALIST. I was ennuye; the everlasting decency and respectability of my surroundings bored me. On whichever side of me I looked, I saw people doing the same things for the same reasons; or for the same lack of reasons. And they were uninteresting. "Oh," said I to myself, "these are the people of the ruts; they go that way because others have gone; they are conforming. But there must be some persons who do not conform. Where are they?" Now you can understand why it was that my thoughts turned toward that monument of our civilization on the Hudson River, and why finally I made up my mind to visit it. I knew that neither my citizenship, nor yet my philosophic and human interest in the working of that great school would avail to obtain me entrance there, so I sought out one of the politicians of my district, who at that time at least exercised his activities outside of the walls of the building, and I exchanged with him a five-dollar bill for an order to admit me. "I suppose," I said to the attendant who did the honors of the place for me, "that these persons who are garbed alike and who affect the same tonsorial effect are those who have been unskillful in their non-conformity." "They are prisoners," he replied. I bit my lip and looked as smug as I remembered one should who as yet has the right of egress as well as ingress in an institution of that character. At that moment my eyes fell on a face that seemed familiar to me, and as I studied it I saw with surprise that I had come upon a man who had once been a schoolmate of mine.