er strong,
Gird up thy loins! march on!
Defend mankind from Wrong.

THE EDITOR'S EVENING.

Leaf From My Samoan Notebook. (A. D. 2297.)

In that age (_siecle_ XIX, _ad finem_) great attention was given on
the continent of Am-ri-ka to increased speed in locomotion. Men and
women went darting about like the big yellow gnats that we see at
sundown on the western coast of our island when the bay is hazy. The
whole history of that century in both Am-ri-ka and Yoo-rup might well
be written around the fact of _transit_, for transit was the spinal
cord of the whole social, civil, and political order. Man-life then
seemed to oscillate more rapidly than ever before, as if in sympathy
with the vibration of the universal ether.

The struggle for the increase of speed began in the early part of the
century referred to--about 1822. Scarcely had the wars of Na-Bu-Leon
subsided when the matter of getting over the earth's surface at a
greater velocity was taken up as eagerly as if life consisted in going
quickly to a certain point. Men, it would appear, had not yet learned
that the principal aim of this existence is the _going_, and not the
_getting there_. Then it was that the steam En-jo-in was invented. The
Bah-lune had been frequently tried, but always with ludicrous or fatal
results. A young man by the name of Dee Green once essayed this method
in Am-ri-ka, with a most ridiculous catastrophe. A poem was written
about the affair beginning thus--

An aspiring genius was Dee Green.

For more than half a century locomotion by steam prevailed in
Am-ri-ka, though it did not satisfy the demand for swiftness. When
this method no longer sufficed, several expedients were found to
_avoid_ going anywhere. It was observed that the necessity of going
depended upon the limitation of the human voice; that is, of hearing
vocal utterances. The voices of human beings could not then be heard
beyond a certain limit. To hear the voice of a man from Am-ri-ka to
Ing-land was then thought to be impossible. The possessors of voices,
therefore, had in that age to _get together_ before they could
communicate. True, there were some men upon whom this necessity did
not rest, for they could be heard at a great distance. It might be
noted, however, that this kind, called _Homo politicus_, had so little
sense that nobody cared to hear them, so that their success in
vociferation amounted to nothing.

All the people of Am-ri-ka who were