We moved away from the boundary, and then followed a path almost parallel to it, across the meadows. I found it difficult walking, for I was always trying to out-distance my companion, and there was no advantage in doing this if the place led nowhere. I had never kept step with anyone since I left my brother. I amused him by stopping suddenly and saying disconsolately, "This is perfectly terrible. One cannot advance: one cannot progress. Now we of the road----" "Yes. I know." "I was going to say, we advance continually." "I know." "We are always learning, expanding, developing. Why, even in my short life I have seen a great deal of advance--the Transvaal War, the Fiscal Question, Christian Science, Radium. Here for example--" I took out my pedometer, but it still marked twenty-five, not a degree more. "Oh, it's stopped! I meant to show you. It should have registered all the time I was walking with you. But it makes me only twenty-five." "Many things don't work in here," he said, "One day a man brought in a Lee-Metford, and that wouldn't work." "The laws of science are universal in their application. It must be the water in the moat that has injured the machinery. In normal conditions everything works. Science and the spirit of emulation--those are the forces that have made us what we are." I had to break off and acknowledge the pleasant greetings of people whom we passed. Some of them were singing, some talking, some engaged in gardening, hay-making, or other rudimentary industries. They all seemed happy; and I might have been happy too, if I could have forgotten that the place led nowhere. I was startled by a young man who came sprinting across our path, took a little fence in fine style, and went tearing over a ploughed field till he plunged into a lake, across which he began to swim. Here was true energy, and I exclaimed: "A cross-country race! Where are the others?" "There are no others," my companion replied; and, later on, when we passed some long grass from which came the voice of a girl singing exquisitely to herself, he said again: "There are no others." I was bewildered at the waste in production, and murmured to myself, "What does it all mean?" He said: "It means nothing but itself"--and he repeated the words slowly, as if I were a child. "I understand," I said quietly, "but I do not agree. Every achievement is worthless unless it is a link in the chain of development. And I must not trespass on your kindness any longer. I must get back somehow to the road, and have my pedometer mended." "First, you must see the gates," he replied, "for we have gates, though we never use them."