the imperfect descriptions of single thoughts
which words at best could give, induced an invincible distaste for the
laborious impotence of language.

When, however, the first intellectual intoxication had, after several
generations, somewhat sobered down, it was recognized that records
of the past were desirable, and that the despised medium of words was
needful to preserve it. Persian had meanwhile been wholly forgotten. In
order to avoid the prodigious task of inventing a complete new language,
the institution of the interpreters was now set up, with the idea of
acquiring through them a knowledge of some of the languages of the
outside world from the mariners wrecked on the islands.

Owing to the fact that most of the castaway ships were English, a better
knowledge of that tongue was acquired than of any other, and it
was adopted as the written language of the people. As a rule, my
acquaintances wrote slowly and laboriously, and yet the fact that they
knew exactly what was in my mind rendered their responses so apt
that, in my conversations with the slowest speller of them all, the
interchange of thought was as rapid and incomparably more accurate and
satisfactory than the fastest talkers attain to.

It was but a very short time after I had begun to extend my acquaintance
among the mind-readers before I discovered how truly the interpreter had
told me that I should find others to whom, on account of greater natural
congeniality, I should become more strongly attached than I had been to
him. This was in no wise, however, because I loved him less, but them
more. I would fain write particularly of some of these beloved friends,
comrades of my heart, from whom I first learned the undreamed-of
possibilities of human friendship, and how ravishing the satisfactions
of sympathy may be. Who, among those who may read this, has not known
that sense of a gulf fixed between soul and soul which mocks love I Who
has not felt that loneliness which oppresses the heart that loves it
best! Think no longer that this gulf is eternally fixed, or is any
necessity of human nature. It has no existence for the race of our
fellow-men which I describe, and by that fact we may be assured that
eventually it will be bridged also for us. Like the touch of shoulder to
shoulder, like the clasping of hands, is the contact of their minds and
their sensation of sympathy.

I say that I would fain speak more particularly of some of my friends,
but wa