Recently I read an imaginary letter, supposed to have been written by a Wellsley College girl.  It was dated one hundred years in the future.  She wrote: 

“Father gave me a new airship a few weeks ago.  I leave my home in Baltimore every morning after breakfast and reach Wellsley in time for classes.  We have only thirty minutes in school in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon.  Our teachers are in telepathic touch with all knowledge and we get it in condensed form.  A few days ago, just after lunch at noon I took a spin up into Canada; the machine got a little out of fix, so I jumped on a gyroscope and returned in time for dinner at six.

“Yesterday I sailed over to New York City and took dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria; had two capsules for dinner and they were delicious.  I read how the people used to sit around tables and eat all kinds of things.  It must have been funny to see their mouths all going at one time.  Then they had stomach trouble—­indigestion they called it.  Now we have everything necessary for the human system put up in capsules; we get up a thousand feet above the earth where the air is pure, so we ought to live to be two hundred years old.

“Last week my classmate and I took a flying trip to see the Panama Canal, and while there we decided to take in the Exposition at San Francisco next day.  There we saw many antiquated machines called automobiles; they used to run around the streets in rubber stockings, honking horns to warn the poor, then turning turtle they killed or maimed the rich.  In one department we saw an animal with long tail, and a mane on its neck.  They called it a horse and told us that years ago horses were harnessed and driven about the streets, while the fast ones were raced for money.”

That young woman may be all right about her capsule dinners and condensed instruction, but one hundred years from now, when on her way from the west to Wellsley if she will stop in Lexington, Ky., she will see a horse sale in progress; horses selling from five hundred to ten thousand dollars that will trot or pace a mile in less than two minutes, while slow ones will be hitched to dead wagons, used to gather up those who have fallen from airships and gyroscopes.  It may be that one hundred years in the future airships will be seen soaring over the cities, delivering packages in parachutes at the back doors of residences, but the day will never dawn when there will be an airship, gyroscope, or an automobile that will supplant the fleet-footed, sleek-coated, handsome Kentucky horse.

Now I come to the more practical, for I do not bring you this talk, challenging your criticism or inviting your praise of it as a literary production, but with the purpose of helping some one live as I would wish to live if I had my life to live over.