Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/90



Brown and I had completed our home tour, and were safely back again within forty-eight hours. Time is money in these busy days. But the next section of our business tour is not quite so promptly despatched. We were now, in short, to get ready for the foreign tour, and I had certain plans of my own in regard to it, which I must here allude to. First, we would begin with the outer circuit. In taking, lastly, the inner circuit, I must needs gratify an old ambition I have indulged to visit the sun. That was still a difficult, nay, even a dangerous voyage, and, consequently, I never could get my wife's consent to embark upon it, even although I held out the prospects of solid profits in Helium exchanges and other solar trading. The fact is, that the reputed danger constituted still the protection of the solar trade, while that of the planets, the more adjacent of them particularly, was already ground down to the very smallest return, by universal competition, that bane of all modern business.