Roland Clewe remained on the bridge until he had reached its
western end, far out on the old Jersey flats, and there he took a
car of the suspended electric line, which would carry him to his
home, some fifty miles in the interior. The rails of this line
ran along the top of parallel timbers, some twenty feet from the
ground, and below and between these rails the cars were
suspended, the wheels which rested on the rails being attached
near the top of the car. Thus it was impossible for the cars to
run off the track; and as their bottoms or floors were ten or
twelve feet from the ground, they could meet with no dangerous
obstacles. In consequence of the safety of this structure, the
trains were run at a very high speed.

Roland Clewe was a man who had given his life, even before he
ceased to be a boy, to the investigation of physical science and
its applications, and those who thought they knew him called him
a great inventor; but he, who knew himself better than any one
else could know him, was aware that, so far, he had not invented
anything worthy the power which he felt within himself.

After the tidal wave of improvements and discoveries which had
burst upon the world at the end of the nineteenth century there
had been a gradual subsidence of the waters of human progress,
and year by year they sank lower and lower, until, when the
twentieth century was yet young, it was a common thing to say
that the human race seemed to have gone backward fifty or even a
hundred years.

It had become fashionable to be unprogressive. Like old