en it, and the thoughtful look was
strongest in the beautiful grey eyes, which were more serious than of
yore. Ayrault stood riveted to the spot and gazed. "I could have been
happy with her," he mused, "and to think she is no more!"

As drops fell from the ice, tears rose to his eyes.

. . . . . . .

"What a pretty girl!" said Bearwarden to Cortlandt, as they came upon
it later in the day. "The face seems etched or imprinted by some
peculiar form of freezing far within the ice."

The next morning they again set out, and so tramped, hunted, and
investigated with varying success for ten Saturnian days. They found
that in the animal and plant forms of life Nature had often, by some
seeming accident, struck out in a course very different from any on the
earth. Many of the animals were bipeds and tripeds, the latter
arranged in tandem, the last leg being evidently an enormously
developed tail, by which the creature propelled itself as with a
spring. The quadrupeds had also sometimes wings, and their bones were
hollow, like those of birds. Whether this great motive and lifting
power was the result of the planet's size and the power of gravitation,
or whether some creatures had in addition the power of developing a
degree of apergetic repulsion to offset it, as they suspected in the
case of the boa-constrictor that fell upon Cortlandt on Jupiter, they
could not absolutely ascertain. Life was far less prolific on Saturn
than on Jupiter, doubtless as a result of its greater distance from the
sun, and of its extremes of climate, almost all organic life being
driven to the latitudes near the equator. There were, as on Jupiter,
many variations from the forms of life to which they were accustomed,
and adaptations to the conditions in which they found themselves; but,
with the exception of the strange manifestations of spirit life, they
found the workings of the fundamental laws the same. Often when they
woke at night the air was luminous, and they were convinced that if
they remained there long enough it would be easy to devise some
telegraphic code of light-flashes by which they could communicate with
the spirit world, and so get ideas from the host of spirits that had
already solved the problem of life and death, but who were not as yet
sufficiently developed to be able to return to the earth. One day they
stopped to investigate what they had supposed to be an optical
illusion. T