warm fingers into mine and ringing me round with a circle. "But
firstly might they help me out of my clothes? It was hot, and these
things were cumbersome." As to the eating, I was agreeable enough
seeing how casual meals had been with me lately, but my clothes, though
Heaven knows they were getting horribly ragged and travel-stained, I
clung to desperately.

My new friends shrugged their dimpled shoulders and, arguments being
tedious, at once squatted round me in the dappled shade of a big tree
and produced their stores of never failing provisions. After a
pleasant little meal taken thus in the open and with all the simplicity
Martians delight in, we got to talking about those yellow canoes which
were bobbing about on the blue waters of the bay.

"Would you like to see where they are grown?" asked an individual
basking by my side.

"Grown!" I answered with incredulity. "Built, you mean. Never in my
life did I hear of growing boats."

"But then, sir," observed the girl as she sucked the honey out of the
stalk of an azure convolvulus flower and threw the remains at a
butterfly that sailed across the sunshine, "you know so little! You
have come from afar, from some barbarous and barren district. Here we
undoubtedly grow our boats, and though we know the Thither folk and
such uncultivated races make their craft by cumbrous methods of flat
planks, yet we prefer our own way, for one thing because it saves
trouble," and as she murmured that all-sufficient reason the gentle
damsel nodded reflectively.

But one of her companions, more lively for the moment, tickled her with
a straw until she roused, and then said, "Let us take the stranger to
the boat garden now. The current will drift us round the bay, and we
can come back when it turns. If we wait we shall have to row in both
directions, or even walk," and again planetary slothfulness carried the
day.

So down to the beach we strolled and launched one of the golden-hued
skiffs upon the pretty dancing wavelets just where they ran, lipped
with jewelled spray, on the shore, and then only had I a chance to
scrutinise their material. I patted that one we were upon inside and
out. I noted with a seaman's admiration its lightness, elasticity, and
supreme sleekness, its marvellous buoyancy and fairy-like "lines," and
after some minutes' consideration it suddenly flashed across me that it
was all of gourd rind. And as if to supply confirmation, the flat land
we we