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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