s
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 o