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the room. Incontinently the little kinetoscope was dropped, Graham was

invited to stand in front of the machine and the tailor muttered some

instructions to the crop-haired lad, who answered in guttural tones and

with words Graham did not recognise. The boy then went to conduct an

incomprehensible monologue in the corner, and the tailor pulled out a

number of slotted arms terminating in little discs, pulling them out

until the discs were flat against the body of Graham, one at each

shoulder blade, one at the elbows, one at the neck and so forth, so that

at last there were, perhaps, two score of them upon his body and limbs.

At the same time, some other person entered the room by the lift,

behind Graham. The tailor set moving a mechanism that initiated a

faint-sounding rhythmic movement of parts in the machine, and in another

moment he was knocking up the levers and Graham was released. The tailor

replaced his cloak of black, and the man with the flaxen beard proffered

him a little glass of some refreshing fluid. Graham saw over the rim of

the glass a pale-faced young man regarding him with a singular fixity.

The thickset man had been pacing the room fretfully, and now turned and

went through the archway towards the balcony, from which the noise of

a distant crowd still came in gusts and cadences. The cropheaded lad

handed the tailor a roll of the bluish satin and the two began fixing

this in the mechanism in a manner reminiscent of a roll of paper in a

nineteenth century printing machine. Then they ran the entire thing on

its easy, noiseless bearings across the room to a remote corner where

a twisted cable looped rather gracefully from the wall. They made some

connexion and the machine became energetic and swift.

"What is that doing?" asked Graham, pointing with the empty glass to

the busy figures and trying to ignore the scrutiny of the new comer. "Is

that--some sort of force--laid on?"

"Yes," said the man with the flaxen beard.

"Who is that?" He indicated the archway behind him.

The man in purple stroked his little beard, hesitated, and answered in

an undertone, "He is Howard, your chief guardian. You see, Sire,--it's

a little difficult to explain. The Council appoints a guardian and

assistants. This hall has under certain restrictions been public. In

order that people might satisfy themselves. We have barred the doorways

for the first time. But I think--if you don't mind, I will leave him to

explain."

"Odd" said Graham. "Guardian? Council?" Then turning his back on the new

comer, he asked in an undertone, "Why is this man glaring at me? Is he a

mesmerist?"

"Mesmerist! He is a capillotomist."

"Capillotomist!"

"Yes--one of the chief. His yearly fee is sixdoz lions."

It sounded sheer nonsense. Graham snatched at the last phrase with an

unsteady mind. "Sixdoz lions?" he said.

"Didn't you have lions? I suppose not. You had the old pounds? They are

our monetary units."

"But what was that you said--sixdoz?"

"Yes. Six dozen, Sire. Of course things, even these little things,

have altered. You lived in the days of the decimal system, the Arab

system--tens, and little hundreds and thousands. We have eleven numerals

now. We have single figures for both ten and eleven, two figures for

a dozen, and a dozen dozen makes a gross, a great hundred, you know, a

dozen gross a dozand, and a dozand dozand a myriad. Very simple?"

"I suppose so," said Graham. "But about this cap--what was it?"

The man with the flaxen beard glanced over his shoulder.

"Here are your clothes!" he said. Graham turned round sharply and saw

the tailor standing at his elbow smiling, and holding some palpably new

garments over his arm. The crop-headed boy, by means of one finger,

was impelling the complicated machine towards the lift by which he had

arrived. Graham stared at the completed suit. "You don't mean to say--!"

"Just made," said the tailor. He dropped the garments at the feet of

Graham, walked to the bed on which Graham had so recently been lying,

flung out the translucent mattress, and turned up the looking glass. As

he did so a furious bell summoned the thickset man to the corner. The

man with the flaxen beard rushed across to him and then hurried out by

the archway.

The tailor was assisting Graham into a dark purple combination garment,

stockings, vest, and pants in one, as the thickset man came back from

the corner to meet the man with the flaxen beard returning from the

balcony. They began speaking quickly in an undertone, their bearing had

an unmistakable quality of anxiety. Over the purple under-garment came a

I complex but graceful garment of bluish white, and I Graham was clothed

in the fashion once more and saw himself, sallow-faced, unshaven and

shaggy still, but at least naked no longer, and in some indefinable

unprecedented way graceful.

"I must shave," he said regarding himself in the glass.

"In a moment," said Howard.

The persistent stare ceased. The young man closed his eyes, reopened

them, and with a lean hand extended, advanced on Graham. Then he

stopped, with his hand slowly gesticulating, and looked about him.

"A seat," said Howard impatiently, and in a moment the flaxen-bearded

man had a chair behind Graham. "Sit down, please," said Howard.

Graham hesitated, and in the other hand of the wildeyed man he saw the

glint of steel.

"Don't you understand, Sire?" cried the flaxen-bearded man with hurried

politeness. "He is going to cut your hair."

"Oh!" cried Graham enlightened. "But you called him--

"A capillotomist--precisely! He is one of the finest artists in the

world."

Graham sat down abruptly. The flaxen-bearded man disappeared. The

capillotomist came forward with graceful gestures, examined Graham's

ears and surveyed him, felt the back of his head, and would have sat

down again to regard him but for Howard's audible impatience. Forthwith

with rapid movements and a succession of deftly handled implements he

shaved Graham's chin, clipped his moustache, and cut and arranged his

hair. All this he did without a word, with something of the rapt air of

a poet inspired. And as soon as he had finished Graham was handed a pair

of shoes.

Suddenly a loud voice shouted--it seemed from a piece of machinery in

the corner--"At once--at once. The people know all over the city. Work

is being stopped. Work is being stopped. Wait for nothing, but come."

This shout appeared to perturb Howard exceedingly. By his gestures it

seemed to Graham that he hesitated between two directions. Abruptly

he went towards the corner where the apparatus stood about the little

crystal ball. As he did so the undertone of tumultuous shouting from the

archway that had continued during all these occurrences rose to a mighty

sound, roared as if it were sweeping past, and fell again as if receding

swiftly. It drew Graham after it with an irresistible attraction. He

glanced at the thickset man, and then obeyed his impulse. In two strides

he was down the steps and in the passage, and, in a score he was out

upon the balcony upon which | the three men had been standing.

CHAPTER V. THE MOVING WAYS

He went to the railings of the balcony and stared upward. An exclamation

of surprise at his appearance, and the movements of a number of people

came from the spacious area below.

His first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into

which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in

either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the

huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out

the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams

that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a

gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the

chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice

hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite

facade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circular

perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vast

windows, and an intricate scheme of architectural relief. Athwart these

ran inscriptions horizontally and obliquely in an unfamiliar lettering.

Here and there close to the roof cables of a peculiar stoutness were

fastened, and drooped in a steep curve to circular openings on the

opposite side of the space, and even as Graham noted these a remote

and tiny figure of a man clad in pale blue arrested his attention.

This little figure was far overhead across the space beside the higher

fastening of one of these festoons, hanging forward from a little ledge

of masonry and handling some well-nigh invisible strings dependent from

the line. Then suddenly, with a swoop that sent Graham's heart into his

mouth, this man had rushed down the curve and vanished through a round

opening on the hither side of the way. Graham had been looking up as he

came out upon the balcony, and the things he saw above and opposed to

him had at first seized his attention to the exclusion of anything else.

Then suddenly he discovered the roadway! It was not a roadway at all,

as Graham understood such things, for in the nineteenth century the

only roads and streets were beaten tracks of motionless earth, jostling

rivulets of vehicles between narrow footways. But this roadway was three

hundred feet across, and it moved; it moved, all save the middle,

the lowest part. For a moment, the motion dazzled his mind. Then he

understood.

Under the balcony this extraordinary roadway ran swiftly to Graham's

right, an endless flow rushing along as fast as a nineteenth century

express train, an endless platform of narrow transverse overlapping

slats with little interspaces that permitted it to follow the curvatures

of the street. Upon it were seats, and here and there little kiosks,

but they swept by too swiftly for him to see what might be therein. From

this nearest and swiftest platform a series of others descended to the

centre of the space. Each moved to the right, each perceptibly slower

than the one above it, but the difference in pace was small enough to

permit anyone to step from any platform to the one adjacent, and so walk

uninterruptedly from the swiftest to the motionless middle way. Beyond

this middle way was another series of endless platforms rushing with

varying pace to Graham's left. And seated in crowds upon the two widest

and swiftest platforms, or stepping from one to another down the steps,

or swarming over the central space, was an innumerable and wonderfully

diversified multitude of people.

"You must not stop here," shouted Howard suddenly at his side. "You must

come away at once."

Graham made no answer. He heard without hearing. The platforms ran with

a roar and the people were shouting. He perceived women and girls

with flowing hair, beautifully robed, with bands crossing between the

breasts. These first came out of the confusion. Then he perceived that

the dominant note in that kaleidoscope of costume was the pale blue that

the tailor's boy had worn. He became aware of cries of "The Sleeper.

What has happened to the Sleeper?" and it seemed as though the rushing

platforms before him were suddenly spattered with the pale buff of

human faces, and then still more thickly. He saw pointing fingers. He

perceived that the motionless central area of this huge arcade just

opposite to the balcony was densely crowded with blue-clad people. Some

sort of struggle had sprung into life. People seemed to be pushed up the

running platforms on either side, and carried away against their will.

They would spring off so soon as they were beyond the thick of the

confusion, and run back towards the conflict.

"It is the Sleeper. Verily it is the Sleeper," shouted voices. "That is

never the Sleeper," shouted others. More and more faces were turned to

him. At the intervals along this central area Graham noted openings,

pits, apparently the heads of staircases going down with people

ascending out of them and descending into them. The struggle it seemed

centred about the one of these nearest to him. People were running

down the moving platforms to this, leaping dexterously from platform to

platform. The clustering people on the higher platforms seemed to divide

their interest between this point and the balcony. A number of sturdy

little figures clad in a uniform of bright red, and working methodically

together, were employed it seemed in preventing access to this

descending staircase. About them a crowd was rapidly accumulating.

Their brilliant colour contrasted vividly with the whitish-blue of their

antagonists, for the struggle was indisputable.

He saw these things with Howard shouting in his ear and shaking his arm.

And then suddenly Howard was gone and he stood alone.

He perceived that the cries of "The Sleeper" grew in volume, and that

the people on the nearer platform were standing up. The nearer swifter

platform he perceived was empty to the right of him, and far across the

space the platform running in the opposite direction was coming crowded

and passing away bare. With incredible swiftness a vast crowd had

gathered in the central space before his eyes; a dense swaying mass

of people, and the shouts grew from a fitful crying to a voluminous

incessant clamour: "The Sleeper! The Sleeper!" and yells and cheers, a

waving of garments and cries of "Stop the ways!" They were also crying

another name strange to Graham. It sounded like "Ostrog." The slower

platforms were soon thick with active people, running against the

movement so as to keep themselves opposite to him.

"Stop the ways," they cried. Agile figures ran up swiftly from the

centre to the swift road nearest to him, were borne rapidly past him,