had perished in the great
plague (which our Doctor there thinks was probably the small-pox), they
considered this destructive malady as a special mark of providential
favor for them. How about the miserable Indians? Were they anything but
planetary foundlings? No! Civilization is a great foundling hospital,
and fortunate are all those who get safely into the creche before the
frost or the malaria has killed them, the wild beasts or the venomous
reptiles worked out their deadly appetites and instincts upon them. The
very idea of humanity seems to be that it shall take care of itself and
develop its powers in the "struggle for life." Whether we approve it or
not, if we can judge by the material record, man was born a foundling,
and fought his way as he best might to that kind of existence which we
call civilized,--one which a considerable part of the inhabitants of our
planet have reached.

If you do not like the expression planetary foundlings, I have no
objection to your considering the race as put out to nurse. And what a
nurse Nature is! She gives her charge a hole in the rocks to live in,
ice for his pillow and snow for his blanket, in one part of the world;
the jungle for his bedroom in another, with the tiger for his watch-dog,
and the cobra as his playfellow.

Well, I said, there may be other parts of the universe where there are
no tigers and no cobras. It is not quite certain that such realms of
creation are better off, on the whole, than this earthly residence of
ours, which has fought its way up to the development of such centres of
civilization as Athens and Rome, to such personalities as Socrates, as
Washington.

"One of our company has been on an excursion among the celestial bodies
of our system, I understand," said the Professor.

Number Five colored. "Nothing but a dream," she said. "The truth is, I
had taken ether in the evening for a touch of neuralgia, and it set my
imagination at work in a way quite unusual with me. I had been reading
a number of books about an ideal condition of society,--Sir Thomas Mores
'Utopia,' Lord Bacon's 'New Atlantis,' and another of more recent date.
I went to bed with my brain a good deal excited, and fell into a deep
slumber, in which I passed through some experiences so singular that, on
awaking, I put them down on paper. I don't know that there is anything
very original about the experiences I have recorded, but I thought them
worth preserving. Perhaps you would no