lives. We, living thirty years longer, feel ourselves defrauded with
less than eleven out of the twenty-four.

By ten o'clock we were over Lake Michigan. The west shore was lightless,
except for a dull ground-glare at Chicago, and a single
traffic-directing light--its leading beam pointing north--at Waukegan on
our starboard bow. None of the Lake villages gave any sign of life; and
inland, westward, so far as we could see, blackness lay unbroken on the
level earth. We swooped down and skimmed low across the dark, throwing
calls county by county. Now and again we picked up the faint glimmer of
a house-light, or heard the rasp and rend of a cultivator being played
across the fields, but Northern Illinois as a whole was one inky,
apparently uninhabited, waste of high, forced woods. Only our
illuminated map, with its little pointer switching from county to county
as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls,
urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General
Communicator brought no answer.' Illinois strictly maintained her own
privacy in the timber which she grew for that purpose.

'Oh, this is absurd!' said De Forest. 'We're like an owl trying to work
a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let's land, Arnott, and get hold of
some one.'

We brushed over a belt of forced woodland--fifteen-year-old maple sixty
feet high--grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too big, where we
moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through the warm dark night
towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the garden gate I could have
sworn we had stepped knee-deep in quicksand, for we could scarcely drag
our feet against the prickling currents that clogged them. After five
paces we stopped, wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry