which is superior to his, and I think he is right. To go no further than your fascinating friend Bellagranda, he, whom she acknowledges to be her "dear papa," cannot control her when she gets into her tantrums, but is obliged to apply to me for assistance. She is powerful, too, and would fly out on the earth with all her dogs, as an innumerable army of fiery serpents, were it not for my spells and physic. It shows you what evolution is. There is hardly a limit to the power and perfection to which we may arrive in the fulness of time. Seeing that our power is divided—he monarch of the upper world, and prince of the power of the air, and I his physician and supreme elder here in his absence—he thinks that his affairs would go to ruin if I made my escape, which he knows I am longing to do. He will not take me up. Every time he goes himself he has the balloon searched, lest I should be there in the shape of a bird or a mouse. He is pleased to set a very high value upon me and my services, and has told me several times that he would sooner lose a million of his ordinary subjects than his great and clever Director-General. Of course he is a gross flatterer, and a liar and deceiver to the back-bone; but we must not speak of him; he may astonish us when we least expect it. What kind of people have you in your world now?'
'I should think they are nearly the same kind of people as you had in yours, sir, in the days of Cromwell and Charles the Second. We are changed, of course—improved, if you will allow it; our minds expanded by a wider sphere of knowledge, and perhaps made wiser, though that is doubtful, by the additional experience of two hundred years. Our outward manners may be more refined, our habits more pacific, and our vices less prominent than they were; but men are still, and I suppose always will be, subservient to their ruling passions. If all men lived to be a hundred
