"Can you ask?" he replied. "Just fancy what misery such power would cause in our present condition; what temptation it would be to evil; what an aid it might give to cruelty. But I do not fancy it will ever be required, for as soon as a man is fit to use the power, he will not require the aid of any instrument. The powers of vision are slowly changing from generation to generation, in the direction here indicated. It is the same with regard to hearing. Ask any man who is acquainted with the roar of London, if it strikes with the sense of confusing sound. No, he is capable quite unconsciously of listening to a whisper, or some soft strain of music, and being quite oblivious to the uproar going on around. If we for one moment were able to hear, as people fancy they do, all sounds in proportion to their magnitude, we should that instant be struck deaf by the thunder of universal movement, the tumult of unceasing vibration. But we hear only just as much as our natures are fitted to make use of. With the aid of the sixth sense, we hear just as much or just as little as we will." He led me to another instrument. "Put your ear to that," he said. "It is not a telephone, but it answers the purpose far better. Now concentrate your thought on some distant sound you would like to hear." I thought of my own hall clock, which has a peculiar, solemn, old-fashioned tick. I could hear it distinctly, and even now there came the familiar rattling sound, then slowly it chimed a quarter past eleven. "Try again," my companion said. I thought of my cottage by the sea, and wished to hear the waves on the beach as I hear them from my bedroom window. I listened, but could distinguish nothing. "There is no sound this time," I said. "It is low tide," he replied, "and the sea is calm. You must will to be upon the sand." I did so, and in a moment the little wavelets seemed tumbling over my feet, splashing and trickling back over the sand. It seemed impossible that I could be thirty miles from the sea, and nearly a hundred from that sandy beach; for the sea on nearly all our southern coasts, breaking as it does on shingle, can give forth no such sweet sounds as these. *CHAPTER V* In this way Alan Sydney gave me an idea of the limitations of our present sense-organs, and how, by superior knowledge, they may be altered and varied. I was able to feel things at a distance that I did not touch, and touch things near me without being able to feel them.