you see on the great continent—are mere hills compared with the ring mountains of our world. Man cannot even yet fly, but sometimes as a great feat he risks his earth-life by floating on a huge gas ball in the air, carried by every current. All on earth clings to the surface, and ever has so clung. Even in the ages long gone by before the days of man, the huge beings of primeval time crawled in the marshes. Only a few birds soar a mile or so in the air, and those birds are thought wonderful, the ensigns and heraldic signs of earth's greatest monarchies. Earth is one vast prison-house, where all are bound to the surface.
"What the destiny of earth is to be I cannot say. Men, the most thoughtful and most holy of mankind, believe it is to be destroyed, to be wrapped in some vast cataclysm, and in the great crash of doom be ruined utterly and eternally. Better, methinks, it should be so. It has its work to do in training up brave souls to endure hardness, to develope in the spiritual combat their hidden nobleness. When that work is done and enough human souls have struggled, striven, conquered in the agony of that great combat, better that earth should pass away and be broken up and
