Virginia's evident discontent gave profound pain to Paul. How solemn,' he exclaimed, 'for half Humanity to be discontented!' But he was still more disturbed at the appeal to a chimerical manufacturer of atoms; and he groaned in tones of yet more sonorous sorrow, 'How solemn for half Humanity to be sunk lower than the beasts by superstition!'

However, he hoped that these stupendous evils might, under the present favourable conditions, vanish in the course of a few days' progress; and he went to bed, full of august auguries.

N

CHAPTER VI.

EXT morning he was up be

times; and the prospects of

Humanity looked more glo

rious than ever. He gathered some of the finest pats from the butter-tree, and some fresh French rolls from the breadtree. He discovered a cow close at hand, that allowed him at once to milk it; and a little roast pig ran up to him out of the underwood, and fawning on him with its trotters, said, 'Come, eat me.'

The Professor vivisected it before Vir

ginia's door, that its automatic noise, which the vulgar call cries of pain, might awaken her; and he then set it in a hot dish on the table.

'It has come! it has come!' he shouted, rapturously, as Virginia entered the room, this time in a blue silk dressinggown, embroidered with flowers of gold.

'What has come?' said Virginia, pettishly, for she was suffering from a terrible headache, and the Professor's loud voice annoyed her. 'You don't mean to say that we are rescued, are we?'

'Yes,' answered Paul, solemnly; 'we are rescued. We are rescued from all the pains and imperfections of a world

that has not learnt how to conform to the laws of matter, and is but imperfectly acquainted with the science of sociology. It is therefore inevitable that, the evils of existence being thus removed, we shall both be solemnly, stupendously, and unspeakably happy.'

'Nonsense!' said Virginia, snappishly, who thought the Professor was joking.

'It is not nonsense,' said the Professor. 'It is deducible from the teachings of John Stuart Mill, of Auguste Comte, of Mr. Frederic Harrison, and of all the exact thinkers who have cast off superstition, and who adore Humanity.'

Virginia meanwhile ate fâté de foie gras, of which she was passionately fond;

and, growing a little less sullen, she at last admitted that they were lucky in having at least the necessaries of life left to them. 'But as for happiness-there is nothing to do here, there is no church to go to, and you don't seem to care a bit for my dressing-gown. What have we got to make us happy?"

'Humanity,' replied the Professor eagerly, Humanity, that divine entity, which is necessarily capable of everything that is fine and invaluable, and is the object of indescribable emotion to all exact thinkers. And what is Humanity?' he went on more earnestly; 'you and I are Humanity—you and I are that august existence. You already are all the world