The Visitor
we did so the policeman majestically moved up, estimated the comparative wealth of the three people concerned, and falsely imagining my friend to be an actor in broad daylight, he took the taximan's part, and ordered us off back to the " Angel," telling us we ought to be thankful to be let off so lightly. He further gave the taxi-man elaborate instructions for reaching the place.
As I had no desire to get to the "Angel" really, I implored the taxi-man to take me back to Westminster, which he was willing to do, and on the way the Man from the Future was most entertaining. He spotted the public-houses as we passed, and asked me, as a piece of solid, practical information, whether wine, beer, and spirits were sold in them. I said, "Of course," but he told me that there was a great controversy in his generation, some people maintaining that the number of them was, in fiction, drawn by enemies; others said that they were, as a fact, quite few and unimportant in London, and others again that they simply did not exist but were the creations of social satire. He asked me to point him out the houses of Brill and Ferguson, who, it seems, were in the eyes of the Twenty-second Century the principal authors of our time. When I answered that I had never heard of them he said, "That is interesting." I was a little annoyed and asked him whether he had ever heard of Kipling, Miss Fowler, or Swinburne.
He said of course he had read Kipling and Swin-
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