attendance! No doubt--but a natural death. A natural death is better
than an artificial life, surely? That's--to be frank with you--the
very citadel of my position."

That led him, and rather promptly, before the botanist could rally
to reply, to a great tirade against the laws that forbade "sleeping
out." He denounced them with great vigour, and alleged that for his
own part he broke that law whenever he could, found some corner of
moss, shaded from an excess of dew, and there sat up to sleep. He
slept, he said, always in a sitting position, with his head on his
wrists, and his wrists on his knees--the simple natural position for
sleep in man.... He said it would be far better if all the world
slept out, and all the houses were pulled down.

You will understand, perhaps, the subdued irritation I felt, as I
sat and listened to the botanist entangling himself in the logical
net of this wild nonsense. It impressed me as being irrelevant. When
one comes to a Utopia one expects a Cicerone, one expects a person
as precise and insistent and instructive as an American
advertisement--the advertisement of one of those land agents, for
example, who print their own engaging photographs to instil
confidence and begin, "You want to buy real estate." One expects to
find all Utopians absolutely convinced of the perfection of their
Utopia, and incapable of receiving a hint against its order. And
here was this purveyor of absurdities!

And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this too one of the
necessary differences between a Modern Utopia and those finite
compact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be
a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental