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erased not only every sign of civilization from the face of this great land, but even

the name of the enemy from the knowledge and language of the people.

I could only account for it on the hypothesis that the country had been entirely

depopulated except for a few scattered and forgotten children, who, in some

marvelous manner, had been preserved by Providence to re-populate the land.

These children had, doubtless, been too young to retain in their memories to

transmit to their children any but the vaguest suggestion of the cataclysm which

had overwhelmed their parents.

Professor Cortoran, since my return to Pan-America, has suggested another

theory which is not entirely without claim to serious consideration. He points out

that it is quite beyond the pale of human instinct to desert little children as my

theory suggests the ancient English must have done. He is more inclined to

believe that the expulsion of the foe from England was synchronous with

widespread victories by the allies upon the continent, and that the people of

England merely emigrated from their ruined cities and their devastated, blood-

drenched fields to the mainland, in the hope of finding, in the domain of the

conquered enemy, cities and farms which would replace those they had lost.

The learned professor assumes that while a long-continued war had strengthened

rather than weakened the instinct of paternal devotion, it had also dulled other

humanitarian instincts, and raised to the first magnitude the law of the survival

of the fittest, with the result that when the exodus took place the strong, the

intelligent, and the cunning, together with their offspring, crossed the waters of

the Channel or the North Sea to the continent, leaving in unhappy England only

the helpless inmates of asylums for the feebleminded and insane.

My objections to this, that the present inhabitants of England are mentally fit,

and could therefore not have descended from an ancestry of undiluted lunacy he

brushes aside with the assertion that insanity is not necessarily hereditary; and

that even though it was, in many cases a return to natural conditions from the

state of high civilization, which is thought to have induced mental disease in the

ancient world, would, after several generations, have thoroughly expunged every

trace of the affliction from the brains and nerves of the descendants of the

original maniacs.

Personally, I do not place much stock in Professor Cortoran's theory, though I

admit that I am prejudiced. Naturally one does not care to believe that the object

of his greatest affection is descended from a gibbering idiot and a raving maniac.

But I am forgetting the continuity of my narrative--a continuity which I desire to

maintain, though I fear that I shall often be led astray, so numerous and varied

The Lost Continent