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“Harpies?” I repeated, in disgust. “Why not the sea-serpent also?”

“There was a sea-serpent which lived for years in that cove yonder,” said the Captain, pointing to a pleasant bay on the starboard, “but I have not seen it lately. Unless I am in error, it had a pitched battle hereabouts with a kraken. I don’t remember who got the better of the fight–but I haven’t seen the snake since.”

As I scanned the surface of the water to see if I might not detect some trace of one or another of these marvellous beasts of the sea, I remarked a bank of fog lying across our course.

“And what is this that we are coming to?” I inquired.

“That?” Captain Vanderdecken responded, indicating the misty outline straight before us. “That is Altruria–at least it is so down in the charts, but I have never set eyes on it actually. It belongs to Utopia, you know; and they say that, although it is now on the level of the earth, it used once to be a flying island–the same which was formerly known as Laputa, and which was first visited and described by Captain Lemuel Gulliver about the year 1727, or a little earlier.”

“So that is Altruria,” I said, trying in vain to see it more clearly. “There was an Altrurian in New York not long ago, but I had no chance of speech with him.”

“They are pleasant folk, those Altrurians,” said the Captain, “although rather given to boasting. And they have really little enough to brag about, after all. Their climate is execrable–I find it ever windy hereabouts, and when I get in sight of that bank of fog, I always look out for squalls. I don’t know just what the population is now, but I doubt if it is growing. You see, people talk about moving there to live, but they are rarely in a hurry to do it, I notice. Nor are the manufactures of the Altrurians as many as they were said to be. Their chief export now is the famous Procrustean bed; although the old house of Damocles & Co. still does a good business in swords. Their tonnage is not what it used to be, and I’m told that they are issuing a good deal of paper money now to try and keep the balance of trade in their favor.”

“Are there not many poets among the inhabitants of Altruria?” I asked.

“They are all poets and romancers of one kind or another,” declared the Captain. “Come below again into the cabin, and I will show you some of their books.”

The sky was now overcast and there was a chill wind blowing, so I was not at all loath to leave the deck, and to follow Vanderdecken down the steps into the cabin.

He took a thin volume from the table. “This,” he said, “is one of their books–‘News from Nowhere,’ it is called.”

He extended it towards me, and I held out my hand for it, but it slipped through my fingers. I started forward in a vain effort to seize it.

As I did so, the walls and the floor of the cabin seemed to melt away and to dissolve in air, and beyond them and taking their place were the walls and floor of my own house. Then suddenly the clock on the mantelpiece struck five, and I heard a bob-tail car rattling and clattering past the door on its way across town to Union Square, and thence to Greenwich Village, and so on down to the Hoboken Ferry.

Then I found myself on my own sofa, bending forward to pick up the volume of Cyrano de Bergerac, which lay on the carpet at my feet. I sat up erect and collected my thoughts as best I could after so strange a journey. And I wondered why it was that no one had ever prepared a primer of imaginary geography, giving to airy nothings a local habitation and a name, and accompanying it with an atlas of maps in the manner of the Carte du Pays de Tendre.

(1894.)