Who will be the Savior, through whose agency this happy cross fertilization, inoculation or union shall be achieved? It was the above thoughts, and the idea of an alliance between COLUMBIA and BRITANNIA, that suggested in all seriousness the following frivolously allegorical narrative,—a potpourri of weird fancy, satire and imagination, a mosaic of the sublime and the ridiculous, on themes worthy of a master.
Yet if some reader should find, even in this fantastic guise, an occasional thought worthy of arousing him to nobler efforts, the author will consider himself well rewarded.
In regard to his prophecies for the future, he is willing to be called a consummate prevaricator should his desire for the betterment of mankind or the unity of nations take place much sooner than he has predicted, or the calamities fail to materialize or prove to be much lighter than he has foreseen.
G. C.
CHAPTER I
The Young Ladies’ Seminary
It is 1960, Anno Domini. The Earth, notwithstanding many dire predictions of charlatans and religious fanatics, and in spite of numerous cataclysms, conflagrations and political upheavals, was rotating serenely on its axis.
The Diana Young Ladies’ Seminary, situated upon the picturesque hills of Cornwall on the Hudson, is a few miles north of the West Point Military Academy. The seminary buildings, having formerly been the palatial homestead of a multi-millionaire, about half a century previously had been bequeathed to the State of New York, with ample endowments for its maintenance and development. It had long since become one of the finest institutions of learning of its kind, not only of America, but of the whole civilized world.