nd listened, as if in an ecstasy, to a sound which
seemed to me no better than a tiny chirping from an innumerable
multitude of lilliputian grasshoppers.

"Truly," replied I, "your sense of hearing serves you in good stead,
and fills up many of your deficiencies. But permit me to point out
that your life in Lineland must be deplorably dull. To see nothing but
a Point! Not even to be able to contemplate a Straight Line! Nay, not
even to know what a Straight Line is! To see, yet be cut off from
those Linear prospects which are vouchsafed to us in Flatland! Better
surely to have no sense of sight at all than to see so little! I grant
you I have not your discriminative faculty of hearing; for the concert
of all Lineland which gives you such intense pleasure, is to me no
better than a multitudinous twittering or chirping. But at least I can
discern, by sight, a Line from a Point. And let me prove it. Just
before I came into your kingdom, I saw you dancing from left to right,
and then from right to left, with Seven Men and a Woman in your
immediate proximity on the left, and eight Men and two Women on your
right. Is not this correct?"

"It is correct," said the King, "so far as the numbers and sexes are
concerned, though I know not what you mean by 'right' and 'left'. But
I deny that you saw these things. For how could you see the Line, that
is to say the inside, of any Man? But you must have heard these
things, and then dreamed that you saw them. And let me ask what you
mean by those words 'left' and 'right'. I suppose it is your way of
saying Northward and Southward."

"Not so," replied I; "besides your motion of Northward and Southward,
there is another motion which I call from right to left."

KING. Exhibit to me, if you please, this motion from left to right.

I. Nay, that I cannot do, unless you could step out of your Line
altogether.

KING. Out of my Line? Do you mean out of the world? Out of Space?

I. Well, yes. Out of YOUR World. Out of YOUR Space. For your Space
is not the true Space. True Space is a Plane; but your Space is only a
Line.

KING. If you cannot indicate this motion from left to right by
yourself moving in it, then I beg you to describe it to me in words.

I. If you cannot tell your right side from your left, I fear that no
words of mine can make my meaning clear to you. But surely you cannot
be ignorant of so simple a distinction.

KING. I do not in the least