ow my wife and mother escaped I shall not say. I make a point of never
explaining the escape of my wife, whether from Martians or Wenuses; but
that night, as Commander-in-Chief, she issued this cataleptic despatch:

"The Wenuses are able to paralyse all but strong-minded women
with their deadly Tea-Tray. Also they burn a Red Weed, the
smoke of which has smothered our troops in Westbourne Grove. No
sooner have they despoiled Whiteley's than they will advance
upon Jay's and Marshall and Snelgrove's. It is impossible to
stop them. There is no safety from the Tea-Tray and the Red
Weed but in instant flight."

That night the world was again lit by a pale pink flash of light. It was
the Fifth Crinoline.

IV.

WRECKAGE.

The general stampede that ensued on the publication of my wife's
despatch is no fit subject for the pen of a coherent scientific writer.
Suffice it to say, that in the space of twenty-four hours London was
practically empty, with the exception of the freaks at Barnum's, the
staff of _The Undertakers' Gazette_, and Mrs. Elphinstone (for that,
_pace_ Wilkie Collins, was the name of the Woman in White), who would
listen to no reasoning, but kept calling upon "George," for that was the
name of my cousin's man, who had been in the service of Lord Garrick,
the Chief Justice, who had succumbed to dipsomania in the previous
invasion.

Meantime the Wenuses, flushed with their success in Westbourne Grove,
had carried their devastating course in a south-easterly direction,
looting Marshall and Snelgrove's, bearing away the entire stock of
driving-gloves from Sleep's and subjecting Redfern's to the asphyxiating
fumes of the Red Weed.

It is calculated that they spent nearly two days in Jay's, trying on all
the costumes in that establishment, and a week in Peter Robinson's.
During these days I never quitted Uxbridge Road Station, for just as I
was preparing to leave, my eye caught the title on the bookstall of
Grant Allen's work, _The Idea of Evolution!_ and I could not stir from
the platform until I had skimmed it from cover to cover.

Wearily mounting the stairs, I then turned my face westward. At the
corner of Royal Crescent, just by the cabstand, I found a man lying in
the roadway. His face was stained with the Red Weed, and his language
was quite unfit for the columns of _Nature_.

I applied a limp lettuce to his fevered brow, took his temperature with
my theodolite, and