By the by, my dear friend, do you not think it would have puzzled these ancient dogmaticians to have determined by which of their two roads it was that the most important and most sublime of all their truths was, in effect, attained?  I mean the truth of Gravitation.  Newton owed it to Kepler.  Kepler admitted that his three laws were guessed at —­ these three laws of all laws which led the great Inglitch mathematician to his principle, the basis of all physical principle —­ to go behind which we must enter the Kingdom of Metaphysics.  Kepler guessed —­ that is to say imagined.  He was essentially a “theorist” —­ that word now of so much sanctity, formerly an epithet of contempt.  Would it not have puzzled these old moles too, to have explained by which of the two “roads” a cryptographist unriddles a cryptograph of more than usual secrecy, or by which of the two roads Champollion directed mankind to those enduring and almost innumerable truths which resulted from his deciphering the Hieroglyphics.

One word more on this topic and I will be done boring you.  Is it not passing strange that, with their eternal prattling about roads to Truth, these bigoted people missed what we now so clearly perceive to be the great highway —­ that of Consistency?  Does it not seem singular how they should have failed to deduce from the works of God the vital fact that a perfect consistency must be an absolute truth!  How plain has been our progress since the late announcement of this proposition!  Investigation has been taken out of the hands of the ground-moles and given, as a task, to the true and only true thinkers, the men of ardent imagination.  These latter theorize.  Can you not fancy the shout of scorn with which my words would be received by our progenitors were it possible for them to be now looking over my shoulder?  These men, I say, theorize; and their theories are simply corrected, reduced, systematized —­ cleared, little by little, of their dross of inconsistency —­ until, finally, a perfect consistency stands apparent which even the most stolid admit, because it is a consistency, to be an absolute and an unquestionable truth.

April 4. —­ The new gas is doing wonders, in conjunction with the new improvement with gutta percha.  How very safe, commodious, manageable, and in every respect convenient are our modern balloons!  Here is an immense one approaching us at the rate of at least a hundred and fifty miles an hour.  It seems to be crowded with people —­ perhaps there are three or four hundred passengers —­ and yet it soars to an elevation of nearly a mile, looking down upon poor us with sovereign contempt.  Still a hundred or even two hundred miles an hour is slow travelling after all.  Do you remember our flight on the railroad across the Kanadaw continent? —­ fully three hundred miles the hour —­ that was travelling.  Nothing to be seen though —­ nothing to be done but flirt, feast and dance in the magnificent saloons.  Do you remember