t us. It was beautiful, it was young;
but its substance seemed to be of an ethereal quality which we had
never seen or known of. With its full, soft eyes fixed upon us, it
spoke.

"Why are you here?" it asked. "I have said to myself that the next
time I saw any of you I would ask you why you come to trouble us.
Cannot you live content in your own realms and spheres, knowing, as
you must know, how timid we are, and how you frighten us and make us
unhappy? In all this city there is, I believe, not one of us except
myself who does not flee and hide from you whenever you cruelly come
here. Even I would do that, had not I declared to myself that I
would see you and speak to you, and endeavor to prevail upon you to
leave us in peace."

The clear, frank tones of the speaker gave me courage. "We are two
men," I answered, "strangers in this region, and living for the time
in the beautiful country on the other side of the river. Having
heard of this quiet city, we have come to see it for ourselves. We
had supposed it to be uninhabited, but now that we find that this is
not the case, we would assure you from our hearts that we do not
wish to disturb or annoy any one who lives here. We simply came as
honest travellers to view the city."

The figure now seated herself again, and as her countenance was
nearer to us, we could see that it was filled with pensive thought.
For a moment she looked at us without speaking. "Men!" she said.
"And so I have been right. For a long time I have believed that the
beings who sometimes come here, filling us with dread and awe, are
men."

"And you," I exclaimed--"who are you, and who are these forms that
we have seen, these strange inhabitants of this city?"

She gently smiled as she answered, "We are the ghosts of the future.
We are the people who are to live in this city generations hence.
But all of us do not know that, principally because we do not think
about it and study about it enough to know it. And it is generally
believed that the men and women who sometimes come here are ghosts
who haunt the place."

"And that is why you are terrified and flee from us?" I exclaimed.
"You think we are ghosts from another world?"

"Yes," she replied; "that is what is thought, and what I used to
think."

"And you," I asked, "are spirits of human beings yet to be?"

"Yes," she answered; "but not for a long time. Generations of men--I
know not how many--must pass away before we are men and women."