you
call them, come regularly to be milked at sunset, and, if told
beforehand, will come an hour earlier or later to any place pointed
out to them. There were many beasts of burden before the electric
carriages were invented, so intelligent that I have heard the rider
never troubled himself to guide them except when he changed his
purpose, or came to a road they had not traversed before. He would
simply tell them where to go, and they would carry him safely. The
only creature now kept for this purpose is the largest of our birds
(the _caldecta_), about six feet long from head to tail, and with
wings measuring thrice as much from tip to tip. They will sail through
the air and carry their rider up to places otherwise inaccessible. But
they are little used except by the hunters, partly because the danger
is thought too great, partly because they cannot rise more than about
4000 feet from the sea-level with a rider, and within that height
there are few places worth reaching that cannot be reached more
safely. People used to harness them to balloons till we found means to
drive these by electricity--the last great invention in the way of
locomotion, which I think was completed within my grandfather's
memory."

"And," I asked, "have you no animals employed in actually cultivating
the soil?"

"No," she replied, "except the weeding birds of whom I have told you.
When we have a piece of ground too small for our electric ploughs, we
sometimes set them to break it up, and they certainly reduce the soil
to a powder much finer than that produced by the machine."

"I should like to see those machines at work."

"Well," answered Eveena, "I have no doubt we shall pass more than one
of them on our way."

As she said this we reached the great road I had crossed on my
arrival, and turning up this for a short distance, sufficient,
however, to let me perceive that it led to the seaport town of which I
have spoken, we came to a break in the central footpath, just wide
enough to allow us to pass. Looking back on this occasion, I observed
that we were followed by the two other carriages I have mentioned, but
at some distance. We then proceeded up the mountain by a narrow road I
had not seen in descending it. On either side of this lay fields of
the kind already described, one of which was in course of cultivation,
and here I saw the ploughs of which my companion had spoken. Evidently
constructed on the same principle as the carriages,