Bewildered though I was by my teacher’s enigmatic utterance, I no longer chafed against it, but worshipped him in silent adoration. He continued, with more mildness in his voice. “Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you. Let us begin by casting back a glance at the region whence you came. Return with me a while to the plains of Flatland, and I will show you that which you have often reasoned and thought about, but never seen with the sense of sight⁠—a visible angle.”

“Impossible!” I cried; but, the Sphere leading the way, I followed as if in a dream, till once more his voice arrested me: “Look yonder, and behold your own Pentagonal house, and all its inmates.”

I looked below, and saw with my physical eye all that domestic individuality which I had hitherto merely inferred with the understanding. And how poor and shadowy was the inferred conjecture in comparison with the reality which I now beheld! My four sons calmly asleep in the Northwestern rooms, my two orphan grandsons to the South; the servants, the butler, my daughter, all in their several apartments. Only my affectionate wife, alarmed by my continued absence, had quitted her room and was roving up and down in the Hall, anxiously awaiting my return. Also the Page, aroused by my cries, had left his room, and under pretext of ascertaining whether I had fallen somewhere in a faint, was prying into the cabinet in my study. All this I could now see , not merely infer; and as we came nearer and nearer, I could discern even the contents of my cabinet, and the two chests of gold, and the tablets of which the Sphere had made mention.