have worked," said the man, "but what have you been doing?"

"Ah!" said Graham. He forgot everything else, and sat down in the chair.
Within five minutes he heard himself, named, heard "when the Sleeper
wakes," used jestingly as a proverb for remote postponement, and passed
himself by, a thing remote and incredible. But in a little while he knew
those two people like intimate friends.

At last the miniature drama came to an end, and the square face of the
apparatus was blank again.

It was a strange world into which he had been permitted to see,
unscrupulous, pleasure seeking, energetic, subtle, a world too of dire
economic struggle; there were allusions he did not understand, incidents
that conveyed strange suggestions of altered moral ideals, flashes of
dubious enlightenment. The blue canvas that bulked so largely in his
first impression of the city ways appeared again and again as the costume
of the common people. He had no doubt the story was contemporary, and its
intense realism was undeniable. And the end had been a tragedy that
oppressed him. He sat staring at the blankness.

He started and rubbed his eyes. He had been so absorbed in the latter-day
substitute for a novel, that he awoke to the little green and white room
with more than a touch of the surprise of his first awakening.

He stood up, and abruptly he was back in his own wonderland. The
clearness of the kinetoscope drama passed, and the struggle in the vast
place of streets, the ambiguous Council, the swift phases of his waking
hour, came back. These people had spoken of the Council with suggestions
of a vague universality of power. And they had spoken of the Sleeper; it
had not really struck him vividly at the time that he was the Sleeper. He
had to recall precisely what they had said....

He walked into the bedroom and peered up through the quick intervals of
the revolving fan. As the fan swept round, a dim turmoil like the noise
of machinery came in rhythmic eddies. All else was silence. Though the
perpetual day still irradiated his apartments, he perceived the little
intermittent strip of sky was now deep blue--black almost, with a dust of
little stars....

He resumed his examination of the rooms. He could find no way of opening
the padded door, no bell nor other means of calling for attendance. His
feeling of wonder was in abeyance; but he was curious, anxious for
information. He wanted to know exactly how he stood to these new things.
He tr