“By Jove!’’ I said looking at one figure in blue clothes with a belt and baton, “that’s a policeman!”

“Really,” said my new acquaintance, “is that what a policeman was?  I’ve often wondered.  What used they to be used for?”

“Used for?” I repeated in perplexity.  “Why, they stood at the corner of the street.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” he said, “so as to shoot at the people.  You must excuse my ignorance,” he continued, “as to some of your social customs in the past.  When I took my education I was operated upon for social history, but the stuff they used was very inferior.”

I didn’t in the least understand what the man meant, but had no time to question him, for at that moment we came out upon the street, and I stood riveted in astonishment.

Broadway!  Was it possible?  The change was absolutely appalling!  In place of the roaring thoroughfare that I had known, this silent, moss-grown desolation.  Great buildings fallen into ruin through the sheer stress of centuries of wind and weather, the sides of them coated over with a growth of fungus and moss!  The place was soundless.  Not a vehicle moved.  There were no wires overhead—­no sound of life or movement except, here and there, there passed slowly to and fro human figures dressed in the same asbestos clothes as my acquaintance, with the same hairless faces, and the same look of infinite age upon them.

Good heavens!  And was this the era of the Conquest that I had hoped to see!  I had always taken for granted, I do not know why, that humanity was destined to move forward.  This picture of what seemed desolation on the ruins of our civilisation rendered me almost speechless.

There were little benches placed here and there on the street.  We sat down.

“Improved, isn’t it,” said man in asbestos, “since the days when you remember it?”

He seemed to speak quite proudly.

I gasped out a question.

“Where are the street cars and the motors?”

“Oh, done away with long ago,” he said; “how awful they must have been.  The noise of them!” and his asbestos clothes rustled with a shudder.

“But how do you get about?”

“We don’t,” he answered.  “Why should we?  It’s just the same being here as being anywhere else.”  He looked at me with an infinity of dreariness in his face.

A thousand questions surged into my mind at once.  I asked one of the simplest.

“But how do you get back and forwards to your work?”

“Work!” he said.  “There isn’t any work.  It’s finished.  The last of it was all done centuries ago.”

I looked at him a moment open-mouthed.  Then I turned and looked again at the grey desolation of the street with the asbestos figures moving here and there.

I tried to pull my senses together.  I realised that if I was to unravel this new and undreamed-of future, I must go at it systematically and step by step.