One word more on this topic and I will be done boring you. Is it not passing strange that, with their eternal prattling about roads to Truth, these bigoted people missed what we now so clearly perceive to be the great highway--that of Consistency? Does it not seem singular how they should have failed to deduce from the works of God the vital fact that a perfect consistency must be an absolute truth! How plain has been our progress since the late announcement of this proposition! Investigation has been taken out of the hands of the groundmoles and given, as a task, to the true and only true thinkers, the men of ardent imagination. These latter _theorize_. Can you not fancy the shout of scorn with which my words would be received by our progenitors were it possible for them to be now looking over my shoulder? These men, I say, _theorize_; and their theories are simply corrected, reduced, systematized--cleared, little by little, of their dross of inconsistency--until, finally, a perfect consistency stands apparent which even the most stolid admit, because it is a consistency, to be an absolute and an unquestionable truth. _April 4th._--The new gas is doing wonders, in conjunction with the new improvement with gutta percha. How very safe, commodious, manageable, and in every respect convenient are our modern balloons? Here is an immense one approaching us at the rate of at least a hundred and fifty miles an hour. It seems to be crowded with people--perhaps there are three or four hundred passengers--and yet it soars to an elevation of nearly a mile, looking down upon poor us with sovereign contempt. Still, a hundred or even two hundred miles an hour is slow traveling after all. Do you remember our flight on the railroad across the Kanadaw continent? Fully three hundred miles the hour--_that_ was traveling. Nothing to be seen, though--nothing to be done but flirt, feast and dance in the magnificent saloons. Do you remember what an odd sensation was experienced, when, by chance, we caught a glimpse of external objects while the cars were in full flight? Everything seemed unique--in one mass. For my part, I cannot say but that I preferred the traveling by the slow train of a hundred miles the hour. Here we were permitted to have glass windows--even to have them open--and something like a distinct view of the country was attainable.... Pundit says that _the route_ for the great Kanadaw railroad must have been in some measure marked out about nine hundred years ago! In fact, he goes so far as to assert that actual traces of a road are still discernible--traces referable to a period quite as remote as that mentioned. The track, it appears, was _double_ only; ours, you know, has twelve paths; and three or four new ones are in preparation. The ancient rails are very slight, and placed so close together as to be, according to modern notions, quite frivolous, if not dangerous, in the extreme. The present width of track--fifty feet--is considered, indeed,