Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/81

 methodically supplied with this indispensable article, than in the old days of nature-made water. We must here remember Science's declaration that nothing is ever lost; so that all materials, whether those of water or anything else, after coursing through countless human bodies, ever come back to the factories to be fabricated afresh for their life-supporting purposes, and to be sent coursing about as before upon their everlasting mission.

Our chief introduction was to the great man himself who contracted for this whole sub-system, and whose vast energy stores were mostly placed in this third level of the main shaft of the great system he controlled and supplied. We found our man, as we had expected, enjoying a little leisure and reflection after his early dinner. He was quietly whiffing his cigarette—not, however, of the dirty and hurtful tobacco of a thousand years ago, but of some one or other of the harmless pungencies people nowadays use instead—as though he had not at the moment one single care in the world, when, not an hour before, he was buried deep in the wants of a thousand great societies, and was presently once more to resume his duties. He had just time remaining to show us over his works. These vast energy-accumulations and capacities, consisting partly of successive rows of excess-charged Leydens, convertible instantaneously into current energy, but chiefly in form of conducting-wires from the earth's hot interior lower down, with their apparatus for energy conversion, all occupied, as we