an electric bell. He pressed
this and a rapid clicking began and ceased. He became aware of voices
and music, and noticed a play of colour on the smooth front face. He
suddenly realised what this might be, and stepped back to regard it.

On the flat surface was now a little picture, very vividly coloured,
and in this picture were figures that moved. Not only did they move, but
they were conversing in clear small voices. It was exactly like reality
viewed through an inverted opera glass and heard through a long tube.
His interest was seized at once by the situation, which presented a
man pacing up and down and vociferating angry things to a pretty but
petulant woman. Both were in the picturesque costume that seemed so
strange to Graham. "I have worked," said the man, "but what have you
been doing?"

"Ah!" said Graham. He forgot everything else, and sat down in the chair.
Within five minutes he heard himself named, heard "when the Sleeper
wakes," used jestingly as a proverb for remote postponement, and passed
himself by, a thing remote and incredible. But in a little while he knew
those two people like intimate friends.

At last the miniature drama came to an end, and the square face of the
apparatus was blank again.

It was a strange world into which he had been permitted to see,
unscrupulous, pleasure seeking, energetic, subtle, a world too of dire
economic struggle; there were allusions he did not understand, incidents
that conveyed strange suggestions of altered moral ideals, flashes of
dubious enlightenment. The blue canvas that bulked so largely in his
first impression of the city ways appeared again and again as
the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story was
contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end had
been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat staring at the blankness.

He started and rubbed his eyes. He had been so absorbed in the
latter-day substitute for a novel, that he awoke to the little green
and white room with more than a touch of the surprise of his first
awakening.

He stood up, and abruptly he was back in his own wonderland. The
clearness of the kinetoscope drama passed, and the struggle in the vast
place of streets, the ambiguous Council, the swift phases of his waking
hour, came back. These people had spoken of the Council with suggestions
of a vague universality of power. And they had spoken of the Sleeper; it
had not really struck him vividly at the