be particularly moved, and I heard him humming
under his breath, greatly to my astonishment, for this rough soldier was
not much given to poetry or music:

"Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere,
With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave;
Its temples, its grottoes, its fountains as clear,
As the love-lighted eyes that hang 'oer the wave."

Mr. Sydney Phillips, standing by, and also catching the murmur of
Colonel Smith's words, showed in his handsome countenance some
indications of distress, as if he wished he had thought of those lines
himself.

The girl resumed her narrative:

"Suddenly there dropped down out of the sky strange gigantic enemies,
armed with mysterious weapons, and began to slay and burn and make
desolate. Our forefathers could not withstand them. They seemed like
demons, who had been sent from the abodes of evil to destroy our race.

"Some of the wise men said that this thing had come upon our people
because they had been very wicked, and the Gods in Heaven were angry.
Some said they came from the moon, and some from the far-away stars. But
of these things my forefathers knew nothing for a certainty.

"The destroyers showed no mercy to the inhabitants of the beautiful
valley. Not content with making it a desert, they swept over other parts
of the earth.

"The tradition says that they carried off from the valley, which was our
native land, a large number of our people, taking them first into a
strange country, where there were oceans of sand, but where a great
river, flowing through the midst of the sands, created a narrow land of
fertility. Here, after having slain and driven out the native
inhabitants, they remained for many years, keeping our people, whom they
had carried into captivity, as slaves.

"And in this Land of Sand, it is said, they did many wonderful works.

"They had been astonished at the sight of the great mountains which
surrounded our valley, for on Mars there are no mountains, and after
they came into the Land of Sand they built there, with huge blocks of
stone, mountains in imitation of what they had seen, and used them for
purposes my people did not understand.

"Then, too, it is said they left there at the foot of these mountains
that they had made a gigantic image of the great chief who led them in
their conquest of our world."

At this point in the story the Heidelberg professor again broke in,
fairly trembling with excitement:

"Ge