the ground, out of the way of hoofs and tires.  Automobiles will run on two wheels like a bicycle.  It is to be a mono-rail world, soothed and assured by the drone of gyroscopes.  By that time the patient ingenuity of inventors and engineers will have found the means to run the gyroscopes at a greater speed than is now possible, thus rendering it feasible to use a smaller wheel.  It is a dream based on good, solid reasoning, backed by a great inventor’s careful calculations; H.G.  Wells has given a picture of it in the last of his stories of the future.

Practical railroad men have given to the mono-rail car a sufficiently warm welcome.  They have been impressed chiefly by its suitability to the conditions of transportation in the great new countries, as, for instance, on that line of railway that is creeping north from the Zambesi to open up the copper deposits of northwestern Rhodesia, and on through Central Africa to its terminus at Cairo.  Just such land as this helped to inspire Brennan.  He was a boy when he first saw the endless plains of Australia, and out of that experience grew his first speculations about the future of railway travel.  Such lands make positive and clear demands, if ever they are to be exploited for their full value to humanity.  They need railways quickly laid and cheaply constructed; lines not too exacting in point of curves and gradients; and, finally, fast travel.  It is not difficult to see how valuable the mono-rail would have been in such an emergency as the last Sudan War, when the army dragged a line of railway with it down toward Omdurman.  Petrol-driven cars to replace the expensive steam locomotives, easy rapid transit instead of the laborious crawl through the stifling desert heat—­a complete railway installation, swiftly and cheaply called into being, instead of a costly and cumbersome makeshift.

The car went back to her garage, or engine-shed, or stable, or whatever the railway man of the future shall decide to call it.  Struts were pulled into position to hold her up, the motors were switched off, and the gyroscopes were left to run themselves down in forty-eight hours or so.  When the mono-rail comes into general use, explained Brennan, there will be docks for the cars, with low brick walls built to slide under the platforms and take their weight.

While his guests assembled in a store-shed to drink champagne and eat sandwiches, he produced a big flat book, sumptuously bound, and told us how his patents were being infringed on in Germany.  On that same day there was an exhibition of a mono-rail car on the Brennan principle taking place at the Zooelogical Gardens in Berlin; the book was its catalogue.  It was full of imaginative pictures of trains fifty years hence, and thereto was appended sanguine letter-press.  While there sounded in our ears the hum of the gyroscopes from the car housed in the rear, I translated one paragraph for him.  It was to the effect that one Brennan, an Englishman, had conducted experiments with gyroscopes ten years ago, but the matter had gone no further.