fresh morning senses would gather together a thousand factors for
our impression of this more civilised world. A Modern Utopia will
have done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly
fortifications, the barracks and military defilements of the earthly
vale of Urseren will be wanting. Instead there will be a great
multitude of gracious little houses clustering in college-like
groups, no doubt about their common kitchens and halls, down and
about the valley slopes. And there will be many more trees, and a
great variety of trees--all the world will have been ransacked for
winter conifers. Despite the height of the valley there will be a
double avenue along the road. This high road with its tramway would
turn with us to descend the gorge, and we should hesitate upon the
adventure of boarding the train. But now we should have the memory
of our landlord's curious eye upon us, and we should decide at last
to defer the risk of explanations such an enterprise might
precipitate.

We should go by the great road for a time, and note something of the
difference between Utopian and terrestrial engineering.

The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, the
Urnerloch tunnel, into which the road plunges, will all be beautiful
things.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and
railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to
be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of human
making is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of its
constructive thought, to the failure of its producer fully to grasp
the purpose of its being. Everything to which men continue to give