If the offspring of the Teuto-Scots attained maturity, they were the subjects of such miseries as make New Amazonians often wonder how they supported life’s burden. Their social pleasures were perpetually ruined by their inability to understand the signs of the weather until a tempest was upon them. Such a thing as altering the direction of a steady wind, and thereby producing either wet or fine weather, by means of a huge artificially created vacuum, had never been thought of. Neither had they attained the scientific knowledge which enables us to prevent disastrous thunderstorms by utilising all superfluous electricity, that would otherwise accumulate and work mischief. So much was the life of the ancients dominated by the perpetual changes of weather in the British Islands, that it is said that no conversation ever took place in their day without some allusion to the weather being made in it. Their lives were rendered unbearable by constant troubles which innumerable diseases wrought on their frames, and by the ever-recurring removal of some dear friend by death. The advance of age was not looked for with delight and eagerness, as with us, for it brought with it an appalling train of evils. The body waxed feeble and bent. The eyes grew dim and often sightless. The senses of taste, smell, and hearing became impaired. The voice cracked, and made the speech harsh and shaky. The teeth fell out, after gradually and painfully decaying in the mouth. The gait became unsteady. The mind grew feeble, and the whole body was transformed into a pitiable spectacle of ruin and misery, soon to fall into the grave, unless one of the fell diseases to which these our ancestors were subjected swept them out of life long ere this. Science was then in its infancy, and transfusion of blood was scouted as useless and impracticable, or many of the troubles of those days might have been avoided. All these things were bad enough to endure, but when we remember that the greater part of the human race was led to expect nothing better after bodily death than a continuance of the spiritual ego in a state of horrible and never-ending torture, then indeed we may be thankful that we are free from so many of the ills to which it was then popularly believed all human flesh was heir. CHAPTER VIII. I closed the book which I had been perusing, with a sense of the liveliest amazement. Was it possible, I thought, that this wonderful people had really conquered disease, decay, death, and the elements? The suggestion seemed so wild, and my surroundings altogether were so strange, that I pinched myself to make sure that I had not really left my earthly casing behind me, and emerged, Chrysalis-like, into another world, whereof the grovelling nature of my former existence had failed to give me any conception.