course, after a decision like this, concentration of inhabitants was
out of the question. Every pulpit in Sybaris blazed with sermons on the
text, 'Every man shall sit under his vine and under his fig-tree.'
Everybody saw that a house without its own garden was an abomination,
and easy communication with the suburbs was a necessity.

"It was, indeed, easy enough to show, as the city engineer did, that the
power wasted in lifting people up, and, for that matter, down stairs, in
a five-story house, in one day, would carry all those people I do not
know how many miles on a level railroad track in less time. What you
call horse-railroads, therefore, became a necessity."

I said they made a great row with us.

"Yes," said he, "I saw they did. With us the government owns and repairs
the track, as you do the track of any common road. We never have any
difficulty.

"You see," he added after a pause, "with us, if a conductor sprains the
ankle of a citizen, it is a matter the state looks after. With you, the
citizen must himself be the prosecutor, and virtually never is. Did you
notice a pretty winged Mercury outside the station-house you came to?"

I had noticed it.

"That was put up, I don't know how long ago, in the infancy of these
things. They took a car off one night, without public notice beforehand.
One old man was coming in on it, to his daughter's wedding. He missed
his connection out at Little Krastis, and lost half an hour. Down came
the Kategoros. The company had taken from a citizen what they could not
restore, namely, half an hour."

George lighted another cigar, and laughed very heartily. "That's a great
case in our reports," he said. "The company ventured to go to trial on
it. They hoped they might overturn the old decisions, which were so old
that nobody knows when they were made,--as old as the dancing horses,"
said he, laughing. "They said _time_ was not a thing,--it was a relation
of ideas; that it did not exist in heaven; that they could not be made
to suffer because they did not deliver back what no man ever saw, or
touched, or tasted. What was half an hour? But the jury was pitiless. A
lot of business men, you know,--they knew the value of time. What did
they care for the metaphysics? And the company was bidden to put up an
appropriate statue worth ten talents in front of their station-house, as
a reminder to all their people that a citizen's time was worth
something."

This was George's first vi