Promptly at noon the following day I presented myself before the Committee on Selective Assignments. The offices, which I found without difficulty, were located on the lower floor of an imposing blue-tinted granite edifice; and the Committee itself occupied a hall reminding me vaguely of a court-room, except that its ornamental columns and busts and statues were unparalleled in any court-room I had ever seen. Before a long marble railing sat about fifteen men and women, some old but several conspicuously young. All were perched on cushioned marble seats before little marble pedestals or writing stands, and to their rear were cases lined with rows of parchment-bound volumes that lent the place a scholarly dignity. In front of them, across the railing, were half a dozen tiers of blue stone benches; and on each of the benches stood a huge pile of books, as though the spectators were expected to make use of their time during any delay in the proceedings. But I was not admitted at once into this great hall. First I was escorted into a small anteroom, where three Atlanteans--two youths of about twenty, and a girl of the same age--were seated studiously reading. From a little parchment document which each carried, I felt sure that they were here on a mission similar to my own; but so preoccupied did they seem, that I had no opportunity to question them. For a moment I merely stared at them impatiently; then, turning to inspect the room, I was delighted to observe a pile of little books on a reed stand in one corner. * * * * * After a single curious glance, I began examining these volumes with hungry interest. Their very titles proved alluring, far more alluring than anything printed I had yet seen in Atlantis, with the exception of the lost Homeric masterpiece. Some were works of information dealing with subjects so varied as “Post-Submergence Mural Art,” “The Rise of Government by Selection,” “The Stimulation of Plant Life by Artificial Sunlight,” “History of the Abolition of Crime,” or “History of the Decline of the Upper World”; others were essays on such rare topics as “The Cultivation of Genius,” “Is Altruism One of the Human Instincts?” and “How Atlantis Found the World by Losing It”; still others were works of literature, and, though I had no time to observe them carefully, I saw that they included an epic poem on “Agripides,” a volume of lyrics by some unknown writer of two thousand years ago as well as selections from a dozen lyricists of the present, a poetic drama evidently designed for performance at the annual celebration of the Submergence, several novels and a collection of stories, and a romance of the far future entitled “Super-Art.”