ions
in Europe. And it was the same all over the rest of the world. Eight
crab-shells there, yes, eight billion people were alive on the earth
when the Scarlet Death began.

"I was a young man when the Plague came--twenty-seven years old; and I
lived on the other side of San Francisco Bay, in Berkeley. You remember
those great stone houses, Edwin, when we came down the hills from Contra
Costa? That was where I lived, in those stone houses. I was a professor
of English literature."

[Illustration: I was a professor of English literature 054]

Much of this was over the heads of the boys, but they strove to
comprehend dimly this tale of the past.

"What was them stone houses for?" Hare-Lip queried.

"You remember when your dad taught you to swim?" The boy nodded.
"Well, in the University of California--that is the name we had for
the houses--we taught young men and women how to think, just as I have
taught you now, by sand and pebbles and shells, to know how many people
lived in those days. There was very much to teach. The young men and
women we taught were called students. We had large rooms in which we
taught. I talked to them, forty or fifty at a time, just as I am talking
to you now. I told them about the books other men had written before
their time, and even, sometimes, in their time--"

"Was that all you did?--just talk, talk, talk?" Hoo-Hoo demanded. "Who
hunted your meat for you? and milked the goats? and caught the fish?"

"A sensible question, Hoo-Hoo, a sensible question. As I have told you,
in those days food-getting was easy. We were very wise. A few men got
the food for many men. The other men did other things. As you say, I
talked. I talked all the time, and for this food was given me--much
food, fine food, beautiful food, food that I have not tasted in sixty
years and shall never taste again. I sometimes think the most wonderful
achievement of our tremendous civilization was food--its inconceivable
abundance, its infinite variety, its marvellous delicacy. O my
grandsons, life was life in those days, when we had such wonderful
things to eat."

This was beyond the boys, and they let it slip by, words and thoughts,
as a mere senile wandering in the narrative.

"Our food-getters were called _freemen_. This was a joke. We of the
ruling classes owned all the land, all the machines, everything. These
food-getters were our slaves. We took almost all the food they got, and
left them a little so that the