invited them. Even with the time available the occasion was always awry for such reflection. These dainty triflers made sulking as impossible amongst them as philosophy in a ballroom. When I stalked out like that from the library in fine mood to moralise and apostrophise heaven in a way that would no doubt have looked fine upon these pages, one sprightly damsel, just as the gloomy rhetoric was bursting from my lips, thrust a flower under my nose whose scent brought on a violent attack of sneezing, her companions joining hands and dancing round me while they imitated my agony. Then, when I burst away from them and rushed down a narrow arcade of crumbling mansions, another stopped me in mid-career, and taking the honey-stick she was sucking from her lips, put it to mine, like a pretty, playful child. Another asked me to dance, another to drink pink oblivion with her, and so on. How could one lament amongst all this irritating cheerfulness? An might have helped me, for poor An was intelligent for a Martian, but she had disappeared, and the terrible vacuity of life in the planet was forced upon me when I realised that possessing no cognomen, no fixed address, or rating, it would be the merest chance if I ever came across her again. Looking for my friendly guide and getting more and more at sea amongst a maze of comely but similar faces, I made chance acquaintance with another of her kind who cheerfully drank my health at the Government's expense, and chatted on things Martian. She took me to see a funeral by way of amusement, and I found these people floated their dead off on flower-decked rafts instead of burying them, the send-offs all taking place upon a certain swift-flowing stream, which carried the dead away into the vast region of northern ice, but more exactly whither my informant seemed to have no idea. The voyager on this occasion was old, and this brought to my mind the curious fact that I had observed few children in the city, and no elders, all, except perhaps Hath, being in a state of sleek youthfulness. My new friend explained the peculiarity by declaring Martians ripened with extraordinary rapidity from infancy to the equivalent of about twenty-five years of age, with us, and then remained at that period however long they might live; Only when they died did their accumulated seasons come upon them; the girl turning pale, and wringing her pretty hands in sympathetic concern when I told her there was a land where decrepitude was not so happily postponed. The Martians, she said, arranged their calendar by the varying colours of the seasons, and loved blue as an antidote to the generally red and rusty character of their soil. Discussing such things as these we lightly squandered the day away, and I know of nothing more to note until the evening was come again: that wonderful purple evening which creeps over the outer worlds at sunset, a seductive darkness gemmed with ten thousand stars riding so low in the heaven they seem scarcely more than mast high. When that hour was come my friend tiptoed again to my cheek, and then, pointing to the palace and laughingly hoping fate would send me a bride "as soft as catkin and as sweet as honey," slipped away into the darkness.