ate vicinity.

Taking off my boots, I stole gently down to the scullery and applied the
spectroscope to the keyhole. To my mingled amazement and ecstasy, I
perceived a large dome-shaped fabric blocking up the entire back garden.
Roughly speaking, it seemed to be about the size of a full-grown sperm
whale. A faint heaving was perceptible in the mass, and further
evidences of vitality were forthcoming in a gentle but pathetic
crooning, as of an immature chimaera booming in the void. The truth
flashed upon me in a moment. The Second Crinoline had fallen in my back
garden.

My mind was instantly made up. To expose myself unarmed to the
fascination of the Wonderful Wisitors would have irreparably prejudiced
the best interests of scientific research. My only hope lay in a
complete disguise which should enable me to pursue my investigations of
the Wenuses with the minimum amount of risk. A student of the humanities
would have adopted a different method, but my standpoint has always been
dispassionate, anti-sentimental. My feelings towards the Wenuses were,
incredible as it may seem, purely Platonic. I recognised their
transcendental attractions, but had no desire to succumb to them.
Strange as it may seem, the man who succumbs rarely if ever is
victorious in the long run. To disguise my sex and identity--for it was
_a priori_ almost impossible that the inhabitants of Wenus had never
heard of Pozzuoli--would guard me from the jellifying Mash-Glance of the
Wenuses. Arrayed in feminine garb I could remain immune to their
malignant influences.

With me, to think is to act; so I hastily ran upstairs, shaved off my
moustache, donned my wife's bicycle-skirt, threw her _sortie de bal_
round my shoulders, borrowed the cook's Sunday bonnet from the servants'
bedroom, and hastened back to my post of observation at the scullery
door.

Inserting a pipette through the keyhole and cautiously applying my eye,
I saw to my delight that the Crinoline had been elevated on a series of
steel rods about six feet high, and that the five Wenuses who had
descended in it were partaking of a light but sumptuous repast beneath
its iridescent canopy. They were seated round a tripod imbibing a brown
beverage from small vessels resembling the half of a hollow sphere, and
eating with incredible velocity a quantity of tiny round coloured
objects--closely related, as I subsequently had occasion to ascertain,
to the _Bellaria angelica_,--which they raised t