eady seemed leagues and leagues away.

Probably a warm ocean current played on one side of the peninsula,
while a cold one swept the other, but for scientific aspects of the
question I cared little in my joy at being anew in a soft climate,
amongst beautiful flowers and vivid life again. Mile after mile
slipped quickly by as I strode along, whistling "Yankee Doodle" to
myself and revelling in the change. At one place I met a rough-looking
Martian woodcutter, who wanted to fight until he found I also wanted
to, when he turned very civil and as talkative as a solitary liver
often is when his tongue gets started. He particularly desired to know
where I came from, and, as in the case with so many other of his
countrymen, took it for granted, and with very little surprise, that I
was either a spirit or an inhabitant of another world. With this idea
in his mind he gave me a curious piece of information, which,
unfortunately, I was never able to follow up.

"I don't think you can be a spirit," he said, critically eyeing my
clothes, which were now getting ragged and dirty beyond description.
"They are finer-looking things than you, and I doubt if their toes come
through their shoes like yours do. If you are a wanderer from the
stars, you are not like that other one we have down yonder," and he
pointed to the southward.

"What!" I asked, pricking my ears in amazement, "another wanderer from
the outside world! Does he come from the earth?"--using the word An
had given me to signify my own planet.

"No, not from there; from the one that burns blue in evening between
sun and sea. Men say he worked as a stoker or something of the kind
when he was at home, and got trifling with a volcano tap, and was
lapped in hot mud, and blown out here. My brother saw him about a week
ago."

"Now what you say is down right curious. I thought I had a monopoly of
that kind of business in this sphere of yours. I should be
tremendously interested to see him."

"No you wouldn't," briefly answered the woodman. "He is the stupidest
fool ever blown from one world to another--more stupid to look at than
you are. He is a gaseous, wavey thing, so glum you can't get two words
a week out of him, and so unstable that you never know when you are
with him and when the breeze has drifted him somewhere else."

I could but laugh and insist, with all respect to the woodcutter, such
an individual were worth the knowing however unstable his constitut