lied; "but I fail to grasp your meaning."

"She means," said the Examiner, raising himself for another last effort,
"that it is time you changed your coal merchant," and so saying he died
again.

I was thunderstruck: the Wenuses understood coals!

And then I ran; I could stand it no longer. The game was up, the cosmic
game for which I had laboured so long and strenuously, and with one
despairing yell of "Ulla! Ulla!" I unfastened the chain, and, leaping
over the limp and prostrate form of the unhappy Tibbles, fled darkling
down the deserted street.

II.

THE MAN AT UXBRIDGE ROAD.

At the corner a happy thought struck me: the landlord of the "Dog and
Measles" kept a motor car. I found him in his bar and killed him. Then I
broke open the stable and let loose the motor car. It was very restive,
and I had to pat it. "Goo' Tea Rose," I said soothingly, "goo'
Rockefeller, then." It became quiet, and I struck a match and started
the paraffinalia, and in a moment we were under weigh.

I am not an expert motist, although at school I was a fairly good
hoop-driver, and the pedestrians I met and overtook had a bad time. One
man said, as he bound up a punctured thigh, that the Heat Ray of the
Martians was nothing compared with me. I was moting towards Leatherhead,
where my cousin lived, when the streak of light caused by the Third
Crinoline curdled the paraffin tank. Vain was it to throw water on the
troubled oil; the mischief was done. Meanwhile a storm broke. The
lightning flashed, the rain beat against my face, the night was
exceptionally dark, and to add to my difficulties the motor took the
wick between its teeth and fairly bolted.

No one who has never seen an automobile during a spasm of motor ataxy
can have any idea of what I suffered. I held the middle of the way for a
few yards, but just opposite Uxbridge Road Station I turned the wheel
hard a-port, and the motor car overturned. Two men sprang from nowhere,
as men will, and sat on its occiput, while I crawled into Uxbridge Road
Station and painfully descended the stairs.

I found the platform empty save for a colony of sturdy little newsboys,
whose stalwart determination to live filled me with admiration, which I
was enjoying until a curious sibillation beneath the bookstall stirred
me with panic.

Suddenly, from under a bundle of _British Weeklies_, there emerged a
head, and gradually a man crawled out. It was the Artilleryman.

"I'm burning hot," he