TWO-LEGS CONQUERS STEAM
1
Two-Legs was now a very old man.
His race was constantly increasing. It lived dispersed over a large and glorious plain, where the rich corn waved in the fields and the cattle waded through the tall and luscious grass. Some of the men followed the sea, others tilled the soil and tended the cattle, others felled timber in the forests. The women kept house and weaved and span.
Wherever the plain rose into a little hill, a wind-mill strutted. Every brook that ran turned the wheel of a water-mill.
Two-Legs himself constantly sat and observed what went on around him in nature and pondered upon it. All looked up to him with respect, as the eldest of the race and the cleverest man in the world. All came to him for advice and help and seldom went away unaided.
In the middle of the plain rose a tall, cone-shaped mountain. From its top, off and on, came a column of smoke. Two-Legs often looked at this mountain. Once he rode up to the top and stood and stared into the hole whence the smoke ascended, but the heat that came out of it was so great that he could not endure it or remain there.
Then he rode back to his house again and sat and gazed at the mountain and thought and wondered what there could be in its depths. He knew mountains that contained gold and iron and other metals; and he taught his children to extract the ore and smelt it and shape the metal into tools and ornaments. But a mountain like this, which smoked at the top, he had never seen before.
2
Now, one day, as he was sitting plunged in thought, he heard voices round about him, as he was wont to do. They whispered in the stately palm-tree that raised its crown high above his head: