“You came by way of England, I suppose?”
“Yes; there is no direct line to America,” said the Altrurian.
“That seems rather odd,” I ventured, with some patriotic grudge.
“Oh, the English have direct lines everywhere,” the banker instructed me.
“The tariff has killed our shipbuilding,” said the professor. No one took up this firebrand, and the professor added: “Your name is Greek, isn’t it, Mr. Homos?”
“Yes; we are of one of the early Hellenic families,” said the Altrurian.
“And do you think,” asked the lawyer, who, like most lawyers, was a lover of romance, and was well read in legendary lore especially, “that there is any reason for supposing that Altruria is identical with the fabled Atlantis’?”
“No, I can’t say that I do. We have no traditions of a submergence of the continent, and there are only the usual evidences of a glacial epoch which you find everywhere to support such a theory. Besides, our civilization is strictly Christian, and dates back to no earlier period than that of the first Christian commune after Christ. It is a matter of history with us that one of these communists, when they were dispersed, brought the Gospel to our continent; he was cast away on our eastern coast on his way to Britain.”
“Yes, we know that,” the minister intervened, “but it is perfectly astonishing that an island so large as Altruria should have been lost to the knowledge of the rest of the world ever since the beginning of our era. You would hardly think that there was a space of the ocean’s surface a mile square which had not been traversed by a thousand keels since Columbus sailed westward.”
“No, you wouldn’t. And I wish,” the doctor suggested in his turn, “that Mr. Homos would tell us something about his country, instead of asking us about ours.”