At first, indeed, I pretended that I was describing the imaginary
experiences of a fictitious person; but my enthusiasm soon forced me
to throw off all disguise, and finally, in a fervent peroration,
I exhorted all my hearers to divest themselves of prejudice
and to become believers in the Third Dimension.
Need I say that I was at once arrested and taken before the Council?
Next morning, standing in the very place where but a very few months ago
the Sphere had stood in my company, I was allowed to begin and to continue
my narration unquestioned and uninterrupted. But from the first I foresaw
my fate; for the President, noting that a guard of the better sort
of Policemen was in attendance, of angularity little, if at all,
under 55 degrees, ordered them to be relieved before I began my defence,
by an inferior class of 2 or 3 degrees. I knew only too well what that meant.
I was to be executed or imprisoned, and my story was to be kept secret
from the world by the simultaneous destruction of the officials
who had heard it; and, this being the case, the President desired
to substitute the cheaper for the more expensive victims.
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