of purple and bluish white, with a little greyshot
beard trimmed to a point, and his hair, its blackness

streaked now with bands of grey, arranged over his
forehead in an unfamiliar but graceful manner. He

seemed a man of five-and-forty perhaps. For a
moment he did not perceive this was himself.

A flash of laughter came with the recognition. "To
call on old Warming like this!" he exclaimed, "and

make him take me out to lunch! "
Then he thought of meeting first one and then

another of the few familiar acquaintances of his early
manhood, and in the midst of his amusement realised

that every soul with whom he might jest had died
many score of years ago. The thought smote him

abruptly and keenly; he stopped short, the expression
of his face changed to a white consternation.

The tumultuous memory of the moving platforms
and the huge facade of that wonderful street reasserted

itself. The shouting multitudes came back clear and
vivid, and those remote, inaudible, unfriendly councilors

in white. He felt himself a little figure, very
small and ineffectual, pitifully conspicuous. And all

about him, the world was--strange.
CHAPTER VII

IN THE SILENT ROOMS
Presently Graham resumed his examination of his

apartments. Curiosity kept him moving in spite of
his fatigue. The inner room, he perceived, was high,

and its ceiling dome shaped', with an oblong aperture
in the centre, opening into a funnel in which a wheel

of broad vans seemed to be rotating, apparently driving
the air up the shaft. The faint humming note of

its easy motion was the only clear sound in that quiet
place. As these vans sprang up one after the other,

Graham could get transient glimpses of the sky. He
was surprised to see a star.

This drew his attention to the fact that the bright
lighting of these rooms was due to a multitude of very

faint glow lamps set about the cornices. There were
no windows. And he began to recall that along all

the vast chambers and passages he had traversed with
Howard he had observed no windows at all. Had

there been windows? There were windows on the
street indeed, but were they for light? Or was the

whole city lit day and night for evermore, so that
there was no night there?

And another thing dawned upon him. There was
no replace" target="_blank" title="n.壁炉，炉灶">fireplace in either room. Was the season summer,

and were these merely summer apartments, or was
the whole City uniformly heated or cooled? He became

interested in these questions, began examining
the smooth texture of the walls, the simply constructed

bed, the ingenious arrangements by which the labour
of bedroom service was practically abolished. And

over everything was a curious absence of deliberate
ornament, a bare grace of form and colour, that he

found very pleasing to the eye. There were several
very comfortable chairs, a light table on silent runners

carrying several bottles of fluids and glasses, and two
plates bearing a clear substance like jelly. Then he

noticed there were no books, no newspapers, no
writing materials. "The world has changed indeed," he

said.
He observed one entire side of the outer room was

set with rows of peculiar double cylinders inscribed
with green lettering on white that harmonized With

the decorativescheme of the room, and in the centre
of this side projected a little apparatus about a yard

square and having a white smooth face to the room. A
chair faced this. He had a transitory idea that these

cylinders might be books, or a modern substitute for
books, but at first it did not seem so.

The lettering on the cylinders puzzled him. At first
sight it seemed like Russian. Then he noticed a

suggestion of mutilated English about certain of the
words.

"oi Man huwdbi Kin"
forced itself on him as "The Man who would be

King." "Phonetic spelling," he said. He remembered
reading a story with that title, then he recalled

the story vividly, one of the best stories in the world.
But this thing before him was not a book as he

understood it. He puzzled out the titles of two adjacent
cylinders. 'The Heart of Darkness,' he had

never heard of before nor 'The Madonna of the
Future'--no doubt if they were indeed stories, they

were by post Victorian authors.
He puzzled over this peculiarcylinder for some time

and replaced it. Then he turned to the square apparatus
and examined that. He opened a sort of lid

and found one of the double cylinders within, and
on the upper edge a little stud like the stud of an

electric bell. He pressed this and a rapid clicking
began and ceased. He became aware of voices and

music, and noticed a play of colour on the smooth
front face. He suddenly realised what this might be,

and stepped back to regard it.
On the flat surface was now a little picture, very

vividly coloured, and in this picture were figures that
moved. Not only did they move, but they were conversing

in clear small voices. It was exactly like
reality viewed through an inverted opera glass and

heard through a long tube. His interest was seized
at once by the situation, which presented a man pacing

up and down and vociferating angry things to a pretty
but petulant woman. Both were in the picturesque

costume that seemed so strange to Graham. "I have
worked," said the man, "but what have you been

doing?"
"Ah!" said Graham. He forgot everything else,

and sat down in the chair. Within five minutes he
heard himself named, heard "when the Sleeper wakes,"

used jestingly as a proverb for remote postponement,
and passed himself by, a thing remote and incredible.

But in a little while he knew those two people like l .
intimate friends.

At last the miniature drama came to an end, and
the square face of the apparatus was blank again.

It was a strange world into which he had been permitted
to see, unscrupulous, pleasure seeking, energetic,

subtle, a world too of dire economic struggle;
there were allusions he did not understand, incidents

that conveyed strange suggestions of altered moral
ideals, flashes of dubious enlightenment. The blue