elf on the savage while he is about it. To-day one
travelled quickly. The science had changed all. For our fathers,
they were religious, and (what was worse) dead. To-day humanity had
electricity to the hand; the machines came from triumphing; all the
lines and limits of the globe effaced themselves. Soon there would not
be but the great Empires and confederations, guided by the science,
always the science.

Here Whiskers stopped an instant for breath; and the man with the
sentiment for human justice had "la parole" off him in a flash. Without
doubt Humanity was on the march, but towards the sentiments, the
ideal, the methods moral and pacific. Humanity directed itself towards
Humanity. For your wars and empires on behalf of civilisation, what were
they in effect? The war, was it not itself an affair of the barbarism?
The Empires were they not things savage? The Humanity had passed all
that; she was now intellectual. Tolstoy had refined all human souls with
the sentiments the most delicate and just. Man was become a spirit; the
wings pushed....

.....

At this important point of evolution the tram came to a jerky stoppage;
and staring around I found, to my stunned consternation, that it was
almost dark, that I was far away from Brussels, that I could not
dream of getting back to dinner; in short, that through the clinging
fascination of this great controversy on Humanity and its recent
complete alteration by science or Tolstoy, I had landed myself Heaven
knows where. I dropped hastily from the suburban tram and let it go on
without me.

I was alone in the flat fields out of sight of the city. On one side
of the road was one of those small, thin woods which are common in all
countries, but of which, by a coincidence, the mystical painters of
Flanders were very fond. The night was closing in with cloudy purple
and grey; there was one ribbon of silver, the last rag of the sunset.
Through the wood went one little path, and somehow it suggested that it
might lead to some sign of life--there was no other sign of life on the
horizon. I went along it, and soon sank into a sort of dancing twilight
of all those tiny trees. There is something subtle and bewildering about
that sort of frail and fantastic wood. A forest of big trees seems
like a bodily barrier; but somehow that mist of thin lines seems like a
spiritual barrier. It is as if one were caught in a fairy cloud or could
not pass a phantom. When I had well lost the la