If only we did not run on so quickly! We seem to get faster every
year. In a very little time, what we wear one day will be quite out of
date the next! When we arrive at this climax, there will be a sudden
convulsion of nature, I should think, and we shall return once more to
the more simple garb of the aborigines. What an amount of trouble it
would save us! No worrying because the dressmaker has not sent our
gowns home in time! No sending them back to be altered! No
dressmaker's or tailor's bills; or at the least, very small ones; for
"woad" could not ruin us _very_ much.

So on the whole it would be well perhaps if this revolution did occur.
Some such convulsion as geologists declare has already frequently
befallen our earth; and, as they prophesy, is shortly coming again.

I do not like talking to these scientific men. They make you feel so
infinitesimally small. They go back such a long, long way. They make
out that from the Creation (which by the way they do not admit, only
considering it another great change in the world springing from
natural causes), from the Creation until now, is the space of a moment
on the great clock of time, is a mere "parenthesis in eternity."

It is not nice to feel such a nonentity. What are our lives, our
little lives in comparison? We, who each consider ourselves the one
person upon the earth, the hero or heroine in the great drama: all the
rest mere by-characters. We do not care to be considered of such
little consequence; only puppets appearing on the stage for one moment
and taken off the next. We are like the clergyman in the small island
off the North of Scotland, who prayed for the inhabitants "of Great
Cumbray and Little Cumbray and the neighboring islands of Great
Britain and Ireland!" On our small piece of land, we yet consider