Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/23

 Brown's ready ear all my ideas about things in general, and our future progress in particular. We remarked how each successive year we had to go further and further out upon the suburban lines to secure this luxury of solitude. Some day London will have overspread the whole country, and some day all the rest of the world will be equally filled. After that where was the increase to find even footroom? How would it be a thousand years hence? We should be filling up the seas, and excavating second and third surfaces beneath our feet.

Lastly, comes myself, in this trio of intimates with White and Brown. My own name is Green, Nunsowe Green, in the cheesemongering and provisioning line, wholesale and retail, and in a business way always at the reader's service.

The estabhshment of "The Shoreditch and Spitalfields Universal Discussion Society" formed quite an era in our locality, and gained me fresh intimacies which I must presently describe, as those, as well as the others already dealt with, have much to do with my present story. That event is now of some little time ago, and our society has attained, in the interval, no small local fame and usefulness amongst us. We discuss freely all questions. But as my particular bent is the future, I turn the tide in that direction on every opportunity; and many a paper I have read, on the question of what our progress, at the present pace, is to do for us. What will things come to a thousand years on? May I be there to see.