lying ship he was presently to try. His attendant officer
described them as a pair of gently curving surfaces a hundred yards
wide, each one for the traffic going in one direction, and made of a
substance called Eadhamite--an artificial substance, so far as he could
gather, resembling toughened glass. Along this shot a strange traffic of
narrow rubber-shod vehicles, great single wheels, two and four wheeled
vehicles, sweeping along at velocities of from one to six miles
a minute. Railroads had vanished; a few embankments remained as
rust-crowned trenches here and there. Some few formed the cores of
Eadhamite ways.

Among the first things to strike his attention had been the great fleets
of advertisement balloons and kites that receded in irregular vistas
northward and southward along the lines of the aeroplane journeys. No
aeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had ceased, and only one
little-seeming aeropile circled high in the blue distance above the
Surrey Hills, an unimpressive soaring speck.

A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to
imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all
the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood,
some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some single
cultivation and preserved the name of a town--as Bournemouth, Wareham,
or Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitable
such a change had been. The old order had dotted the country with
farmhouses, and every two or three miles was the ruling landlord's
estate, and the place of the inn and cobbler, the grocer's shop and
church--the village. Every eight miles or so was the country town,
where lawyer, corn merchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon,
doctor, draper, milliner and so forth lived. Every eight miles--simply
because that eight mile marketing journey, four there and back, was as
much as was comfortable for the farmer. But directly the railways came
into play, and after them the light railways, and all the swift new
motor cars that had replaced waggons and horses, and so soon as the high
roads began to be made of wood, and rubber, and Eadhamite, and all sorts
of elastic durable substances--the necessity of having such frequent
market towns disappeared. And the big towns grew. They drew the worker
with the gravitational force of seemingly endless work, the employer
with their suggestions of an infinite ocean of labou