The reader will please remember that this visit and revelation of the Lunarian Professor took place in 1892, seventeen years ago, and some of the predictions are already due of fulfillment or of apparent progress in that direction. For example he gives Minneapolis a population of 1,780,000 in the year 1925 only sixteen years from the present. This is worse than Walton. But I do not feel at liberty to alter the Professional utterances. If I should begin to do this I would never know where to stop. There will doubtless be found other predictions at variance with our ideas, especially as to the time in which the fulfillment should take place. Time is the most uncertain element concerned in prophetic utterances. Give a prophet time enough and he will successfully predict you anything you like. “All things come to him who waits.” But I have not the assurance to change anything the Professor has said and I am not prepared to aver that the truths as they appear to common mundane mortals are to be preferred to the errors however manifest of so illustrious a prophet—just as we accept the dicta of Moses or St. Paul—when we are entirely sure they do not know what they are talking about. Our Professor is probably wrong in regard to the settlement of some of the questions taken up by him, but to tell the honest truth, I am too ignorant of the disputed points to contradict him. If he says black is white it is safer for me not to talk back. But when it comes to plain statements of facts, concerning the present conditions on the Moon and Mars, in which, from the abundance of personal knowledge there remains no license to draw upon his imagination for his facts, I implicitly trust the Professor. I never saw a pair of eyes so full of honesty for their size, or of as large capacity for honesty as his. Even there, however, some of his statements are liable to be contradicted. For example, the theory of the hump or protuberance on the hither side of the Moon, which had some currency among our astronomers 40 or 50 years ago appears later to have been abandoned by at least some of them, but we should not allow mere theory to counter-balance the testimony of a competent eye witness.
It may seem strange that the Professor has made almost no mention of the great Japanese-Russian war. But as this war settled nothing, did not even settle what there was to be settled it may be considered as a mere incident in the discussion of the real question at issue. This is only my conjecture of the reason of his silence.
The point of view assumed by a Prophet is of little consequence compared with what he sees. Some say, back-sight is more reliable than foresight, and that, considered as a magazine of facts, history is preferable to the imagination. But back-sight is history, and like good liquor it requires aging and maturing. The association of the imagination supplies these effects. History must be read with the help of the imagination even for present use; still more if the inquiry embraces a glance into the future.
Si quaeris futura, circumspice. If you would know the future look around you. That which has been will be. All things have ever been under the domination of evolution and they ever will be. Therefore, let the imagination explore its trail, and you are at once a prophet.
CHAPTER I.
An Outing.
Let me see. It was six (6) years since I had an outing. It seemed a long time and it was long enough to obscure the conviction I had once arrived at that the average outing is on the whole more of a bore than a pleasure and that its principal value consists in making a fellow satisfied with his ordinary work and glad to get back to it again. I am tolerably sure that I should have reached the same opinion even if I had not been the victim of a certain wretched adventure that happened away back in my “courting days”. On the occasion referred to I had taken my best girl for a little rowing and fishing on Brush Lake. We had not proceeded far when she “got a bite”, and it nearly drove her wild with excitement, she stood up in the boat and from her frantic exertions I judged she had hooked nothing less than a six pound bass. At last she pulled it out with a horizontal sweep, and whirling around with it, the middle of the line struck my head with such force as to send the fish revolving around my neck five times, and wound up by inserting the hook in the end of my nose and leaving the fish dangling and flapping against my face—a ridiculous little Sunfish not over three inches long. The excited lady dropped her pole and made such a violent lunge to secure her prize that she upset the boat and left us both floundering in the water. Amongst the fifteen or twenty spectators on the shore was Aquarius Jinks, whose father was a fisherman and had brought him up to think no more of jumping into the water than a water spaniel. So in he jumped and in a jiffy he rescued my lady and took her to the nearest house to get some dry clothes. As for myself, I was getting out all right in spite of the embarrassment of the choking line, my lacerated nose and that wretched fish that did not for a moment let up its frantic struggling and flapping. In addition to this I had the misfortune to be encumbered by the clumsy assistance of a fat German saloon-keeper, who by the help of the pole, which had now floated near the shore, drew me up, amid the jeers of the crowd, that now by the barbarous custom of the times, I was obliged to “treat.”
This exposure laid me up for six weeks with the chills, and about the end of that time there was a wedding—my girl married that Jinks, who took this perfidious advantage of me. I felt very sore for a long time in the region of the diaphragm. The poets usually designate the heart as the particular organ affected in such cases, but I am persuaded it is the semi lunar ganglion or solar plexus, probably the former, from the fact that the victim is apt to be affected by semi lunacy. But that is a question of physiology.
Although I never had another such disastrous experience, yet as I said at first, the average outing with its accidents, fatigues and discomforts, had on the whole, left no very favorable impression on me. Yet I had made up my mind after an interval of six years to try one more. My literary work had tired me out, and a trip, if it gave no pleasure, would hurt at least in another place.