One day, about a week after the interview with Battell in regard to the improvement of the airships, MacNair, Iola, Captain Ganoe and myself had descended to the observatory for our usual after dinner rest. I was in a meditative mood, and not caring to take part in the conversation, I had retired to one of the little alcoves, closed the doors, set the room in motion and brought my window around to a point overlooking the great boulevard, with the pleasure grounds, shrubbery, flower gardens and giant forest trees just beyond. From my lofty perch I looked down upon the scene before me. Bright, happy faces, and kind, cheerful voices, greeted eye and ear through the open window. I felt entranced by the wonderful scenes around me. I could not help but compare this great communal home, where all was abundance, elegant leisure, fascinating social enjoyment, health and happiness, with the crowded, filthy and ill-ventilated tenement houses of New York, London and other large cities of the outer world, which are pre-eminently the abodes of destitution, misery and woe. How often has my heart ached when I have found families of ten and twelve persons, huddled into one or two diminutive rooms, poorly lighted, ill-ventilated and disgustingly filthy. In the living hells of the outer world, I had witnessed every manner of deformity, degradation and filth. Children in rags, just from the arms of their mothers, creeping like cowardly wharf rats about the slums and alley ways, picking up pieces of mouldy bread or fishing in slop barrels and sewers for bits of meat, were scenes of human misery that often made my heart bleed. Then, add to this picture of the conditions into which the children are born, the abject misery of their decrepit grandsires and grandmothers. How often have I seen them, dressed in tatters and exposed to the wintry winds as they tottered off to some alley, or some rich man's ash heap, to scratch out with naked and almost freezing fingers, the little bite of unconsumed coal, so that they might have a little fire to warm their half-famished bodies, while they dined upon the garbage gathered up by the children. Such were the scenes that I had often witnessed in the poverty stricken districts of the large cities of the outer world, and with them I compared the happy scene before me. Not one deaf, dumb, blind, lame, deformed or disfigured individual among the multitudes which often gathered upon the grounds I was now contemplating. Not one ragged, bare-footed and bare-headed urchin, nor one snowy-haired, tottering and infirm old man or woman among them.