Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/295

 easy of perfect success, unless with all the chances of some breadth of time involved in the occasion sought for. Thus if the ancestral doings in question had concerned, say, some al fresco public meeting, lasting for but an hour, there would be small chance of spotting our man, unless indeed the retrospect were only a matter of a century or so. Such short terms were ever the general favourites, because applicants were not kept very long waiting for their answer back from space; but the estimates for a thousand years or upwards were a much more difficult business.

On the other hand, there were great helps available to all parties, from the accumulated records, carefully preserved, of every previous fishing, whether successful or not for its intended object. Every restoration of the past, even although not at all that immediately sought for, might prove subsequently of use to some one, so that rarely indeed was any expended energy, however disappointing as to original intention, absolutely lost. Thus abortive particular efforts to find particular persons, times or events, were usually sold, at so much per year or century of retrospect, to those who made a business, and a good business it was and still is, of that sort of lore. Thus when the view of one hemisphere of the earth, at some particular instant of past time, was duly secured and was found happily to include what was specially sought for, that special section would be taken out by the parties interested, and the whole remainder sold in the market; or if there had been a complete misfit in bringing back either a too early or a too late time, the whole would be thus sold, and, if so inclined, another fishing adventured on. Those who made a business