At this moment the door of the room opened.  A woman’s form appeared.  It was Caroline, robed in one of Anna’s directoire nightgowns.

“I heard your voices,” she said, and then, as she caught sight of Henry, she gave a great cry.

“My husband!”

“My wife,” said Henry, and folded her to his heart.

“You have left Sing Sing?” cried Caroline with joy.

“Yes, Caroline,” said Henry.  “I shall never go back.”

Gaily the reunited family descended.  Anna carried the lamp, Henry carried the club.  William carried the million dollars.

The tamarack fire roared again upon the hearth.  The buttermilk circulated from hand to hand.  William and Henry told and retold the story of their adventures.  The first streak of the Christmas morn fell through the door-pane.

“Ah, my sons,” said John Enderby, “henceforth let us stick to the narrow path.  What is it that the Good Book says:  ’A straight line is that which lies evenly between its extreme points.’”

X. —­ The Man in Asbestos:  An Allegory of the Future

TO begin with let me admit that I did it on purpose.  Perhaps it was partly from jealousy.

It seemed unfair that other writers should be able at will to drop into a sleep of four or five hundred years, and to plunge head-first into a distant future and be a witness of its marvels.

I wanted to do that too.

I always had been, I still am, a passionate student of social problems.  The world of to-day with its roaring machinery, the unceasing toil of its working classes, its strife, its poverty, its war, its cruelty, appals me as I look at it.  I love to think of the time that must come some day when man will have conquered nature, and the toil-worn human race enter upon an era of peace.

I loved to think of it, and I longed to see it.

So I set about the thing deliberately.

What I wanted to do was to fall asleep after the customary fashion, for two or three hundred years at least, and wake and find myself in the marvel world of the future.

I made my preparations for the sleep.

I bought all the comic papers that I could find, even the illustrated ones.  I carried them up to my room in my hotel:  with them I brought up a pork pie and dozens and dozens of doughnuts.  I ate the pie and the doughnuts, then sat back in the bed and read the comic papers one after the other.  Finally, as I felt the awful lethargy stealing upon me, I reached out my hand for the London Weekly Times, and held up the editorial page before my eye.

It was, in a way, clear, straight suicide, but I did it.

I could feel my senses leaving me.  In the room across the hall there was a man singing.  His voice, that had been loud, came fainter and fainter through the transom.  I fell into a sleep, the deep immeasurable sleep in which the very existence of the outer world was hushed.  Dimly I could feel the days go past, then the years, and then the long passage of the centuries.