ere, whose lustrous hue betokened that he had exchanged his
wrath against me for perfectly placability. We were moving together
towards a bright but infinitesimally small Point, to which my Master
directed my attention. As we approached, methought there issued from
it a slight humming noise as from one of your Spaceland bluebottles,
only less resonant by far, so slight indeed that even in the perfect
stillness of the Vacuum through which we soared, the sound reached not
our ears till we checked our flight at a distance from it of something
under twenty human diagonals.

"Look yonder," said my Guide, "in Flatland thou hast lived; of Lineland
thou hast received a vision; thou hast soared with me to the heights of
Spaceland; now, in order to complete the range of thy experience, I
conduct thee downward to the lowest depth of existence, even to the
realm of Pointland, the Abyss of No dimensions.

"Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves,
but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World,
his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception;
he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no
experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor
has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being
really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn
his lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and
that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now
listen."

He ceased; and there arose from the little buzzing creature a tiny,
low, monotonous, but distinct tinkling, as from one of your Spaceland
phonographs, from which I caught these words, "Infinite beatitude of
existence! It is; and there is nothing else beside It."

"What," said I, "does the puny creature mean by 'it'?" "He means
himself," said the Sphere: "have you not noticed before now, that
babies and babyish people who cannot distinguish themselves from the
world, speak of themselves in the Third Person? But hush!"

"It fills all Space," continued the little soliloquizing Creature, "and
what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It
utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer,
Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah,
the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!"

"Can you not startle the little thing out of its complacency