but in one way. Look at
the Greeks. Every schoolboy knows that the Greeks were vastly the
intellectual superiors of any dominant people of to-day. An
anthropologist of standing assures us that the intellectual interval
separating the Greek of the Periclean age from the modern Anglo-Saxon is
as great as the interval between the Anglo-Saxon and the African savage.
Point to a man alive to-day who is the intellectual peer of Aristotle,
Plato, or Socrates. Yet where are the Greeks? What did their exalted
intellectual equipment do to save them in the desperate struggle for the
survival of the fittest? The Greeks of to-day are selling fruit at
corner stands; Plato's descendants shine the world's shoes. They live to
warn away the most casual evolutionist from the theory that intellectual
supremacy necessarily means supremacy of type. Where, then, you may ask,
does lie the principle of triumphant evolution? Here we stand at the
innermost heart of every social scheme. Let us glance a moment," said
Mr. Queed, "at Man, as we see him first emerging from the dark
hinterlands of history."

So, walking through the sweet autumn woods with the one girl he knew in
all the world--barring only Miss Miller--Queed spoke heartily of the
rise and fall of peoples and the destiny of man. Thus conversing, they
came out of the woods and stood upon the platform of the rudimentary
station.

The line ran here on an elevation, disappearing in the curve of a heavy
cut two hundred yards further north. In front the ground fell sharply
and rolled out in a vast green meadow, almost treeless and level as a
mill-pond. Far off on the horizon rose the blue haze of a range of
foothills, upon which the falling sun momentarily stood, like a
gold-piece edge-up on a table. Nearer, to their right, was a strip of
uncleared woods, a rainbow of reds and pinks. Through the meadow ran a
little stream, such as a boy of ten could leap; for the instant it stood
fire-red under the sun.

Sharlee, obtaining the floor for a moment, asked Queed how his own work
had been going. He told her that in one sense it had not been going at
all: not a chapter written from May to September.

"However," he said, with an unclouded face, "I am now giving six hours a
day to it. And it is just as well to go slow. The smallest error of
angle at the centre means a tremendous going astray at the
circumference. I--ahem--do not feel that my summer has been wasted, by
any means. You follow me? I