seasons it was worse than in others.  Once in every half century at first, and afterward every year[4] it broke out somewhere and swept over wide areas with such fatal effect that there were not enough of the living to plunder the dead; but at the first frost it would subside.  During the ensuing two or three months of immunity the stupid survivors returned to the infected homes from which they had fled and were ready for the next outbreak.  Emigration would have saved them all, but although the Californians (over whose happy and prosperous descendants your Majesty has the goodness to reign) invited them again and again to their beautiful land, where sickness and death were hardly known, they would not go, and by the year 1946 the last one of them, may it please your gracious Majesty, was dead and damned.”

    [4] At one time it was foolishly believed that the disease had been
        eradicated by slapping the mosquitoes which were thought to
        produce it; but a few years later it broke out with greater
        violence than ever before, although the mosquitoes had left the
        country.

Having spoken this into the transmitter of the aerial isochronophone at the usual hour of 23 o’clock I applied the receiver to my ear, confidently expecting the customary commendation.  Imagine my astonishment and dismay when my master’s well-remembered voice was heard in utterance of the most awful imprecations on me and my work, followed by appalling threats against my life!

The Ahkoond had changed his dinner-time to five hours later and I had been speaking into the ears of an empty stomach!

JOHN SMITH, LIBERATOR

JOHN SMITH, LIBERATOR

(FROM A NEWSPAPER OF THE FAR FUTURE)

At the quiet little village of Smithcester, which certain archaeologists have professed to “identify” as the ancient London, will be celebrated to-day the thirtieth centennial anniversary of the birth of this remarkable man, the foremost figure of antiquity.  The recurrence of what no more than six centuries ago was a popular fete day and even now is seldom permitted to pass without recognition by those to whom liberty means something more precious than opportunity for gain, excites a peculiar emotion.  It matters little whether or no tradition has correctly fixed the time and place of Smith’s birth.  That he was born; that being born he wrought nobly at the work that his hand found to do; that by the mere force of his powerful intellect he established and perfected our present benign form of government, under which civilization has attained its highest and ripest development—­these are facts beside which mere questions of chronology and geography are trivial and without significance.