London. Killing between four and five thousand head of game in one day
is shooting ill; and one of the party has a gun which would give
twenty-seven discharges in a minute, and mine would give only
twenty-five. I really must change my maker. Have you seen the last new
invention, the hydro-potassian lock?" Hunting machines, that would fly
like balloons over a ten-foot wall--A candidate for the Circumnavigation
Club, who has been four times round the world in his own, yacht--A point
of bad taste to make a morning call by daylight--Dining at twelve
P.M.--A spring-door with a self-acting knocker, which gives a treble
knock, and is opened by a steam porter in livery--A chair mounting from
the hall, through the ceiling, into the drawing room--Talking to a lady
two miles off through a telescope, till one's fingers ache--A
callisthenic academy for the children of pauper operatives--An automaton
note-writer--A lady professing ignorance of Almack's, "a club where
Swift and Johnson used to meet, but I don't profess to be an
antiquarian"--"Love and Algebra," one of the common scientific novels
thumbed by coal-heavers and orange-women, very well for the common
people--Every thing is taught them now by means of scientific novels:
such as "Geological Atoms, or the Adventures of a Dustman"--Doubted
very much whether English wheat is fit for any thing but the brute
creation--Dark times of the 19th century--Six-hourly and half-daily
newspapers--"_apropos_, as the hackney-coachmen say"--Turkey, one
of the southern provinces of Russia--His Majesty Jonathan III. of
Washington--The Emperor of India--The Burmese Republic--English the
language of three-fourths of Asia, nine-tenths of North America, half
Africa, and all the insular states in the South Seas--and England, that
little kingdom, with a population of not more than forty millions, has
had the honour of colonizing half the globe; but "these countries are
our colonies no longer." Such are a few of the wonders of 2130! In the
Dialogue is an admirable joke with a scientific street-sweeper and a