Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/63

 own little world, was something to enlarge the mind, as well as merely to fill the pocket.

Next morning, therefore, while we bent over our small chemical Liebigs, to make ready our simple laboratorial breakfasts before starting, I opened to my companion the project of my more extended travel. My proposal now was to superadd the foreign to the home business tour, and I was delighted with the cordial response given by young Brown, who was evidently, all over, as I have said, a true chip of the old block, and ever ready to jump by preference in the direction of the heaviest profit. Accordingly I sketched out, in the first place, a home business round, to be followed by another round abroad. And, again, as regarded this latter, while we were about it, we would take both the outer and the inner circle of foreign travel, and thus do a good round job once for all.

Let me here, in passing, contrast travel a thousand years ago, and travel now, in this year of grace to which we have arrived, the year 2882. Formerly all travelling was confined to our own little globe, and excepting casual excursions of the most helpless kind in balloons, we could not even lift ourselves off its narrow surface into the surrounding air, let alone getting away into outside space. But now, on the contrary, the air is the ordinary medium of our daily locomotion, as the earth's surface, both above and below, has been long since so crowded with human life, that the old modes either of surface or of under-