more difficult to reproduce
even before my own mental vision. One day, about eleven months after
my return from Spaceland, I tried to see a Cube with my eye closed, but
failed; and though I succeeded afterwards, I was not then quite certain
(nor have I been ever afterwards) that I had exactly realized the
original. This made me more melancholy than before, and determined me
to take some step; yet what, I knew not. I felt that I would have been
willing to sacrifice my life for the Cause, if thereby I could have
produced conviction. But if I could not convince my Grandson, how
could I convince the highest and most developed Circles in the land?

And yet at times my spirit was too strong for me, and I gave vent to
dangerous utterances. Already I was considered heterodox if not
treasonable, and I was keenly alive to the danger of my position;
nevertheless I could not at times refrain from bursting out into
suspicious or half-seditious utterances, even among the highest
Polygonal or Circular society. When, for example, the question arose
about the treatment of those lunatics who said that they had received
the power of seeing the insides of things, I would quote the saying of
an ancient Circle, who declared that prophets and inspired people are
always considered by the majority to be mad; and I could not help
occasionally dropping such expressions as "the eye that discerns the
interiors of things," and "the all-seeing land"; once or twice I even
let fall the forbidden terms "the Third and Fourth Dimensions." At
last, to complete a series of minor indiscretions, at a meeting of our
Local Speculative Society held at the palace of the Prefect
himself,--some extremely silly person having read an elaborate paper
exhibiting the precise reasons why Providence has limited the number of
Dimensions to Two, and why the attribute of omnividence is assigned to
the Supreme alone--I so far forgot myself as to give an exact account
of the whole of my voyage with the Sphere into Space, and to the
Assembly Hall in our Metropolis, and then to Space again, and of my
return home, and of everything that I had seen and heard in fact or
vision. At first, indeed, I pretended that I was describing the
imaginary experiences of a fictitious person; but my enthusiasm soon
forced me to throw off all disguise, and finally, in a fervent
peroration, I exhorted all my hearers to divest themselves of prejudice
and to become believers in the Third Dimen