"But in his way lights on the barren plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With sails and wind their cany waggons light.
Tar careful reader of Paradise Lost will observe that the quotation above does not refer to Satan, but to a vulture with which he is compared. Milton's inspiration here was doubtless derived from Heylin's Cosmography where it is said, "agreeable unto the observation of modern writers, the country is so plain and level that they have carts and coaches driven with sails, as ordinarily as drawn with horses in these parts." Who these modern writers were, the reader must judge for himself. Certainly a very pleasing idea is left upon the mind of posterity by their " observation."? Light, horseless vehicles tacking to and fro—to port and to starboard—over a waterless sea of smooth roads, managed by sailors, who, whatever they may have been, were certainly not "old salts." The picture is so charming, ideal, enchanting, that it were fee-simple vandalism to smash it with a few painful facts of groaning, stridulous wheelbarrows, springless mule carts, garlicky and otherwise insanitary coolies, with frightfully bumpy thoroughfares. In the lines however there really does exist an infinitesiunal atom of reality which may be said
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.