Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/70

60 the mind of a man who spends year after year pointing pins! It may be well to inquire as to whether or not the social and business framework of society is not doing much to reduce some of its members to a state little better than monomania.

To enforce the lesson taught by the Law of Differences we will pass by a million years, while I give the reader a picture of the reconstructed universe. It had been reformed to that degree that the wildest dream of the idealist had been realized. Desiring to have one more look at the old homestead, I came back from spirit-land, was "materialized," and once more walked the solid earth as was my wont a million years before. I need not say I was not quite up to the times. The first thing I noticed was that my physical geography was all at fault. There were no burning sands, no icy wastes, no earthquake, no tornado, no flood, no drought. The whole earth from pole to pole was on the golden-age pattern. In this respect, desire was satisfied. For centuries no one had been heard to complain of any imperfection. All was lovely. To me, with a recollection of what I had suffered in my youth in cold and barren New England—ten in the family, and all big eaters—the change was delightful. But what was my surprise not to find a single soul to share my pleasure! When I talked to those I met of their beautiful world, I spoke in an unknown tongue. I might as well have tried to convince Jones, the druggist, that pure air was as fragrant as the odors which blew from Araby the blest, or any other Araby. Jones would have told me, "I have had air in my nose for fifty years, and, if there is any smell in it, don't you suppose I should have found it out in that time?" They were as stolid as marble, and as unenthusiastic as a proper woman who never felt the slightest twinge of hope, fear, love, hate, or anything else, except propriety. "It is strange," said I, "that no one understands what I feel. . . . Well," I thought, "they have never known anything different, and as a result they do not know this."

I was no less agreeably surprised at the men and women whom I found peopling the globe. The stirpiculturist had finished his work and gone home. There was not a physical deformity of any kind among the millions that walked the earth. All were brought up to the highest type of physical beauty. There was not a woman I met with whom I did not instantly fall in love, though it was like Caliban falling in love with the houris. Every man was an Apollo, and every woman a Venus. But I was surprised to see them so blind to each other's charms. The men were the slowest of slow lovers; the women as responsive as lay-figures. "Ah! well," I sighed, "they never saw in man or in woman anything but beauty, and now they see not that." It seemed that a sight of me, which some of them could not endure without a shudder, had begun to awaken in them a new sense of which the stirpiculturist had robbed them—a sense of the beautiful.