But while all of the historical department proved most diverting to me, there was one section that interested me more than all the rest. This was known as the “Hall of Horrors.” Once having observed the title, I was eager to explore the department in detail--and I was not to be disappointed. Somehow, there was something about the “Hall of Horrors” that seemed familiar, even though a placard at the entrance assured one that all the exhibits had been preserved from a remote antiquity. Thus, the first thing that I noted was a gas masque said to date from the third century B. S., but looking as if it might have been useful in the present World War. Beside the gas masque was a steel helmet reported to be from the fourth century B. S.; yet, had it not been for the card identifying it, I might have suspected it of being taken from the Germans this very year. This suspicion, however, would not have applied to the other military implements ranged about the room; most of them were so crude of design as to make me positively smile. Even as I write this, I can re-capture the mood of exultation I felt at the proof of our own superiority: the rifles of the second century B. S. were so puny-looking and feeble as to appear worse than primitive, and the bayonets were fully half a foot shorter than our own; the machine guns of the first century B. S. had obviously not half the killing capacity of ours, and the cannons were not constructed for long distance firing; while the conspicuous absence of the armored “tank,” the hand grenade and “liquid fire,” showed that the ancient Atlanteans would have had much to learn from the sanguinary experts of our own day. From the “Hall of Horrors” Stranahan conducted us into another and scarcely less interesting department that was apparently nameless, since its miscellany of ancient oddities would have defied classification. “Here’s where you’ll feel at home,” grunted our guide, as with a gesture of welcome he preceded us through the doorway. But his remark had been poorly chosen. We did not feel in the least at home. In fact, I had never had a more distinct reminder of my exile than when I gazed at great brick and iron chimneys towering within glass cases, and catalogued as typical of “The Age of Steel and Fire”; and it made me almost homesick to see pictures of long-vanished cities wrapped in great clouds of smoke and soot, and described succinctly as “Representative of the Tubercular Era in Old Atlantis.” But much more surprising to me were the huge ancient furnaces, resurrected in detail, with puppet stokers in the act of pitching the coal into the giant flames. An explanatory card naïvely declared that “These were once considered necessary evils, not only for industrial reasons, but because the Submergence had not yet made possible the automatic regulation of the weather.”