set down with no knowledge of how I came.
There was a continuous jar and the noise of motion. We passed a barn or
two, I believe, and on one hillside animals were frightened from their
grazing as we passed. There were the cluttered streets of several cities
and villages. There was a prodigious number of telegraph poles going in
the opposite direction, hell-bent as fast as we, which poles considerately
went at half speed through towns, for fear of hitting children. The United
States was once an immense country, and extended quite to the sunset. For
convenience we have reduced its size, and made it but a map of its former
self. Any section of this map can be unrolled and inspected in a day's
time.

In the books for children is the story of the seven-league
boots--wonderful boots, worth a cobbler's fortune. If a prince is escaping
from an ogre, if he is eloping with a princess, if he has an engagement at
the realm's frontier and the wires are down, he straps these boots to his
feet and strides the mountains and spans the valleys. For with the
clicking of the silver buckles he has destroyed the dimensions of space.
Length, breadth and depth are measured for him but in wishes. One wish and
perhaps a snap of the fingers, or an invocation to the devil of
locomotion, and he stands on a mountain-top, the next range of hills blue
in the distance; another wish and another snap and he has leaped the
valley. Wonderful boots, these! Worth a king's ransom. And this prince,
too, as he travels thus dizzily may remember one or two barns, animals
frightened from their grazing, and the cluttered streets nested in the
valley. When he reaches his journey's end he will be just as wise and just
as ignorant as we who now travel by rail in magic, seven-league fashion.
For here I am set down, and all save the last half-mile of my path is lost
in the curve of the mountains. From my window I see the green-covered
mountains, so different from city streets with their horizon of buildings.

I fancy that, on the memorable morning when Aladdin's Palace was set down
in Africa after its magic night's ride from the Chinese capital, a
housemaid must have gone to the window, thrown back the hangings and
looked out, astounded, on the barren mountains, when she expected to see
only the courtyard of the palace and its swarm of Chinese life. She then
recalled that the building rocked gently in the night, and that she heard
a whirling sound as of wind. These wer