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50 wretches who voluntarily exchanged their calm and happy Present for the tumult and anxiety of the Past. However, we are not all reasonable, as you shall hear.

It was already twilight outside, and in the Museum there was only light enough to see that a few persons were assembled in the Great Hall. Christine placed her grandfather in a high-backed wooden chair, in which he spent most of his time, clutching at the arms and fighting with his asthma. Then she turned up the electric light. It showed a large, rather lofty room, oblong in shape. Old arms were arranged round the walls; great glass-cases stood about, filled with a collection of all kinds of things preserved from the old times. There were illustrations of their arts, now entirely useless: such as the jewels they wore, set in bracelets and necklaces; their gloves, fans, rings, umbrellas, pictures, and statuary. Then there were cases tilled with the old implements of writing—paper, inkstands, pens, and so forth—the people have long since left off writing; there were boxes full of coins with which they bought things, and for which they sold their freedom; there were things with which they played games—many of them dangerous ones—and whiled away the tedium of their short lives: there were models of the ships in which they went to sea, also models of all kinds of engines and machines which slaves—they were nearly all slaves—made for the purpose of getting more money for their masters; there were also crowns, coronets, and mitres, which formerly belonged to people who possessed what they called rank; there were the praying-books which were formerly used every day in great buildings like the House of Life; there were specimens of legal documents on parchment, by the drawing up of which, when law existed, a great many people procured a contemptible existence; there were also models, with figures of the people in them, of