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"Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend Mr. So-and-so" is still, among the more old-fashioned of our country gentlemen in districts remote from towns, the customary formula for a Flatland introduction. But in the towns, and among men of business, the words "be felt by" are omitted and the sentence is abbreviated to, "Let me ask you to feel Mr.
It was found recorded on each occasion that: "Whereas the States had been troubled by divers ill-intentioned persons pretending to have received revelations from another World, and professing to produce demonstrations whereby they had instigated to frenzy both themselves and others, it had been for this cause unanimously resolved by the Grand Council that on the first day of each millenary, special injunctions be sent to the Prefects in the several districts of Flatland, to make strict search for such misguided persons, and without formality of mathematical examination, to destroy all such as were Isosceles of any degree, to scourge and imprison any regular Triangle, to cause any Square or Pentagon to be sent to the district Asylum, and to arrest any one of higher rank, sending him straightway to the Capital to be examined and judged by the Council."
The whirling streets, with their endless procession of front steps, bewildered us. By and by we were in a vast district, where all the houses were five-storied, flat-roofed, and seemed built mainly to hold windows. This was Flatland the very heart of it that boundless territory to the northward of Central Park, where nightly the millions sleep.
Prostrating myself mentally before my Guide, I cried, "How is it, O divine ideal of consummate loveliness and wisdom that I see thy inside, and yet cannot discern thy heart, thy lungs, thy arteries, thy liver?" "What you think you see, you see not," he replied; "it is not giving to you, nor to any other Being, to behold my internal parts. I am of a different order of Beings from those in Flatland.
"One of the young men returning from a hunt, I suppose," said Alf, whose attention was aroused by the interest manifested by the surrounding Eskimos. "Not so," said Amalatok, who joined the group at the moment, "the man paddles like a man of Flatland." "What! one of your enemies?" cried the Captain, who, in his then state of depression, would have welcomed a fight as a sort of relief.
That so few of us have the courage clearly to assert a position even distantly approaching this such a position as was mere matter of course among university men in the last generation is perhaps the most significant of all the indications of our drift toward Flatland.
Of course the men of Flatland kept their eyes fixed in wide amazement on Leo, as they paddled along, and this sudden laugh of his impressed them deeply, being apparently without a cause, coupled as it was with an air of absolute indifference to his probable fate, and to the presence of so many foes. Even the ruthless land-hungerer, Grabantak, was solemnised.
Yet before I proceed to my legitimate subject some few final remarks will no doubt be expected by my Readers upon these pillars and mainstays of the Constitution of Flatland, the controllers of our conduct and shapers of our destiny, the objects of universal homage and almost of adoration: need I say that I mean our Circles or Priests?
"I am indeed, in a certain sense a Circle," replied the Voice, "and a more perfect Circle than any in Flatland; but to speak more accurately, I am many Circles in one."
However, the end was not long in coming. My words were cut short by a crash outside, and a simultaneous crash inside me, which impelled me through space with a velocity that precluded speech. Down! down! down! I was rapidly descending; and I knew that return to Flatland was my doom.
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