A friend had sent me a San Francisco paper, and meeting the familiar line therein, I began wondering to myself, as I lay upon my lounge, where the star of empire could go now, seeing that there was no longer any West left; and, reading on, half awake, after a late supper, and seeing in every column allusions to the glorious climate of California (in worn type), I asked myself, with a drowsy smile, whether it were not to reach this same glorious climate, perhaps, that the star in question had been bending her steps westward throughout recorded time. If she is to go any further—I dozed—I—she—will have—to—wade—and I fell asleep! 18. How long I slept I cannot say; but long enough to dream this: Dream I.—[Welsh rarebit.] America, at last (so it seemed to me in my vision), is full; and thousands upon thousands of our redundant population are pouring into Asia,—you among the rest; for your day had come,—and you are all as busy as bees, cutting the throats of the heathen, in order to bring them to a true knowledge of the living God, and secure their lands,—as our ancestors have served the treacherous and implacable Red Men. (When I speak of your cutting their throats, I speak as a man of my time; for it would be the veriest presumption in a mortal of this benighted day to restrict heroes in the blaze of the twenty-third century to such vulgar and ineffectual methods of destroying their fellow-men. Indeed, I must do myself the justice to say that, when I ventured to dream of you as storming the ranges of Thian-Shan and the Kuen-Lun, into which have fled the deluded remnants of the followers of Confucius (of whom, at the date of this dream, you were not one), I did not take the liberty of picturing you to myself, even in a vision of the night-time, as laboriously toiling up those rugged slopes, convincing, as you go, the unregenerate, by the unanswerable suasion of breech-loading cannon and repeating rifles,—lame contrivances of our less-favored age; but)