brought us.

"I will promise, when you come to me," she added, with an expression of
charming archness, passing, as she continued, into one of enthusiasm,
"to seem as sorry for you as you wish, but you must not for a moment
suppose that I am really sorry for you at all, or that I think you will
long be sorry for yourself. I know, as well as I know that the world
now is heaven compared with what it was in your day, that the only
feeling you will have after a little while will be one of thankfulness
to God that your life in that age was so strangely cut off, to be
returned to you in this."

Chapter 9

Dr. and Mrs. Leete were evidently not a little startled to learn, when
they presently appeared, that I had been all over the city alone that
morning, and it was apparent that they were agreeably surprised to see
that I seemed so little agitated after the experience.

"Your stroll could scarcely have failed to be a very interesting one,"
said Mrs. Leete, as we sat down to table soon after. "You must have
seen a good many new things."

"I saw very little that was not new," I replied. "But I think what
surprised me as much as anything was not to find any stores on
Washington Street, or any banks on State. What have you done with the
merchants and bankers? Hung them all, perhaps, as the anarchists wanted
to do in my day?"

"Not so bad as that," replied Dr. Leete. "We have simply dispensed with
them. Their functions are obsolete in the modern world."

"Who sells you things when you want to buy them?" I inquired.

"There is neither selling nor buying nowadays; the distribution of
goods is effected in another way. As to the bankers, having no money we
have no use for those gentry."

"Miss Leete," said I, turning to Edith, "I am afraid that your father
is making sport of me. I don't blame him, for the temptation my
innocence offers must be extraordinary. But, really, there are limits
to my credulity as to possible alterations in the social system."

"Father has no idea of jesting, I am sure," she replied, with a
reassuring smile.

The conversation took another turn then, the point of ladies' fashions
in the nineteenth century being raised, if I remember rightly, by Mrs.
Leete, and it was not till after breakfast, when the doctor had invited
me up to the house-top, which appeared to be a favorite resort of his,
that he recurred to the subject.

"You were surprised," he said, "at my saying that we got along withou