The speaker ceased, and from invisible corridors on both sides of the stage came a noise as of shuffled feet, chattering voices, horns and bells and clattering wheels. “By the Holy Father, if we’re not back in the old U. S. A.!” muttered Stranahan so loud that many of the audience could hear him; and he leaned so far forward that I feared he would fall over the railing into the stage. But the spectacle before us was so engrossing as to make me forget even Stranahan’s absurd conduct. Very quickly I came to agree that Atlantis before the Submergence must indeed have been hideous; I had never known anything quite so ugly as the scene we now witnessed. From both sides of the stage a slow procession of men and women began to file, the two streams passing each other and trailing out in opposite directions; and the faces and figures of the people were the most repulsive I had ever seen. Some were so lean and scrawny as to remind me of walking skeletons; others, fat and bloated, waddled along like living caricatures with scarcely the power of self-locomotion; and the majority had an unnaturally sallow, flushed or mottled complexion that seemed to set them off as a species apart. And their clothes were in accord with their appearance; they were all clad in a drab brown or black, some with a peculiar steely color that encircled their chins and ears, some with strange metallic waist-bands that prevented them from turning in any direction, some with ornamental brass spikes that elevated the soles of their feet inches above their heels and converted their walking into a form of hobbling. But what chiefly interested me were the faces of the people. Not a few, with heavy paunches, and baggy, feeble cheeks, reminded me of nothing so much as of a certain bristly domestic beast; not a few others had features grotesquely like those of baboons, bears, wolves, foxes, weasels, or tigers. And a majority looked like nothing so much as the prey of tigers, weasels, and foxes. Their eyes had a hunted expression, and their whole manner was one of timidity; they seemed continually confused and frightened and ready to run at any sound, and yet had something of the cowed look of creatures beaten into resigned despair. All the while, as they proceeded across the stage, they produced a perfect pandemonium of squeaks, grunts, hoots, rumblings, howlings, and snarlings, some seeming quite familiar to me, others sounding like voices of the wilderness. The acting, I thought, was marvelous; it was executed so perfectly that for the time I had quite forgotten it was acting at all. Hearing the uproar and looking at the dark-robed, distorted multitude, I could not but think by contrast of Aelios and the grace and beauty that surrounded her; and I missed her even more keenly than before, and wondered impatiently if I should not yet see her at the pageant.