Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/94

 which he was thus enabled, by anticipation, on balance, already to call his own.

Young Brown and I had booked our passages for Mars in one of White's regular mail liners. There is already a large business done by our earth with that little but active neighbour of ours, whose people, although with some odd and peculiar ways, which I shall have presently to allude to, get on with us very fairly. There is already also a wonderful bustle of shipping. By White's kind help I secured very comfortable berths, and I had, in my own case at least, a special object in so doing, in connection with yet another design in these travels. There must, after all, be something in Brown's notion of my turn for the pen, as that potent implement is ever in my hand upon any leisure occasion. And now with well on to a whole week before me as we voyaged to Mars, I was ready to enter upon an old project—no less than that of sketching out a retrospective history of the last thousand years. I am often wondering what is to be the state of things in and about our world a thousand years hence; but there is much interest, and a good deal more of reality, in ascertaining and comparing the changes of the like interval just passed. Such, then, is the vocation I propose for myself during the interval of leisure in crossing inter-Marsian space, and the still more considerable spaces that are to follow; and, as I have revolved the subject for many a past day, I am now quite ready to fall to work.