There was a stir, a thrill, a deep excitement everywhere.
Our teaching about the rest of the world has given them all a sense of isolation, of remoteness, of being a little outlying sample of a country, overlooked and forgotten among the family of nations.

We had called it "the family of nations," and they liked the phrase immensely.
They were deeply aroused on the subject of evolution; indeed, the whole field of natural science drew them irresistibly.

Any number of them would have risked everything to go to the strange unknown lands and study; but we could take only one, and it had to be Ellador, naturally.
We planned greatly about coming back, about establishing a connecting route by water; about penetrating those vast forests and civilizing--or exterminating--the dangerous savages.

That is, we men talked of that last--not with the women.

They had a definite aversion to killing things.
But meanwhile there was high council being held among the wisest of them all.