Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/96

 locomotive life, and could then, of course, much accelerate our speed, there was still some noise in the mere rapid cleaving of the air, greatly attenuated although it now began to be. Soon, however, we cleared these very outermost limits of our planet, and entered upon the perfect peace of purely ethereal space. Many have written, poetically, ardently, and otherwise, on this subject, and upon the marked and extraordinary change of the traveller's surroundings. For my part, reducing all that sort of thing to the common sense of a business view, I find the striking change in question both useful and agreeable. One gets back all the fresher to one's office, with renovated powers for work, after such outside trips to a neighbouring planet, or even the short crossing to our moon.

Some of our party still found amusement in watching our earth, as we now rapidly receded from it. Of course, half a century ago, when our illustrious Black first discovered, by help of the reduplication of the cross-electric, the means of our material locomotion in outside space, all such sights were novelties and marvels. But, now that habit has blunted the edge of that sort of thing, and business pervades its every corner, we leave this every-day sight-seeing to our school-boys, or to those high poetic flights which can make mental food out of any mortal thing, common or uncommon, in either earth or heaven.

We are not, on this occasion, in the very fastest express, otherwise we should do our distance in somewhat less than the five days we expect to occupy. But having use for the extra time, in view of my literary efforts, I the less grudge it. The cheaper