tile and bird order, they carried guns and cartridges loaded with
buckshot and No. 1, trusting for solid-ball projectiles to their
revolvers, which they shoved into their belts. They also took
test-tubes for experiments on the Saturnian bacilli. Hanging a bucket
under the pipe leading from the roof, to catch any rain that might
fall--for they remembered the scarcity of drinking-water on
Jupiter--they set out in a southwesterly direction.

Walking along, they noticed on all sides tall lilies immaculately pure
in their whiteness, and mushrooms and toadstools nearly a foot high,
the former having a delicious flavour and extreme freshness, as though
only an hour old. They had seen no animal life, or even sign of it,
and were wondering at its dearth, when suddenly two large white birds
rose directly in front of them. Like thought, Bearwarden and Ayrault
had their guns up, snapping the thumb-pieces over "safe" and pulling
the triggers almost simultaneously. Bearwarden, having double
buckshot, killed his bird at the first fire; but Ayrault, having only
No. 1, had to give his the second barrel, almost all damage in both
cases being in the head. On coming close to their victims they found
them to measure twelve feet from tip to tip, and to have a tremendous
thickness of feathers and down.

"From the looks of these beauties," said Bearwarden, "I should say they
probably inhabited a pretty cold place."

"They are doubtless northern birds," said Cortlandt, "that have just
come south. It is easy to believe that the depth to which the
temperature may fall in the upper air of this planet must be something
startling."

As they turned from the cranes, to which species the birds seemed to
belong, they became mute with astonishment. Every mushroom had
disappeared, but the toadstools still remained.

"Is it possible we did not see them?" gasped Ayrault.

"We must inadvertently have walked some distance since we saw them,"
said Cortlandt.

"They were what I looked forward to for lunch," exclaimed Bearwarden.

They were greatly perplexed. The mushrooms were all about them when
they shot the birds, which still lay where they had fallen.

"We must be very absent-minded," said the doctor, "or perchance our
brains are affected by the air. We must analyze it to see if it
contains our own proportion of oxygen and nitrogen. There was a good
deal of carbonic-acid gas on Jupiter, but that would hardly confuse our
senses. The s