ogate the dream soul of the marvels it sees in its wanderings?
Then he will no longer need to improve his telescopes to find out the
secrets of the universe.

"Do your people visit the Earth in the same manner?" I asked my
companion.

"Certainly," he replied; "but there we find no one able to recognize us
and converse with us as I am conversing with you, although myself in
the waking state. You, as yet, lack the knowledge we possess of the
spiritual side of the human nature which we share with you."

"That knowledge must have enabled you to learn much more of the Earth
than we know of you," I said.

"Indeed it has," he replied. "From visitors such as you, of whom we
entertain a concourse constantly, we have acquired familiarity with your
civilization, your history, your manners, and even your literature and
languages. Have you not noticed that I am talking with you in English,
which is certainly not a tongue indigenous to this planet?"

"Among so many wonders I scarcely observed that," I answered.

"For ages," pursued my companion, "we have been waiting for you to
improve your telescopes so as to approximate the power of ours, after
which communication between the planets would be easily established. The
progress which you make is, however, so slow that we expect to wait ages
yet."

"Indeed, I fear you will have to," I replied. "Our opticians already
talk of having reached the limits of their art."

"Do not imagine that I spoke in any spirit of petulance," my companion
resumed. "The slowness of your progress is not so remarkable to us
as that you make any at all, burdened as you are by a disability so
crushing that if we were in your place I fear we should sit down in
utter despair."

"To what disability do you refer?" I asked. "You seem to be men like
us."

"And so we are," was the reply, "save in one particular, but there the
difference is tremendous. Endowed otherwise like us, you are destitute
of the faculty of foresight, without which we should think our other
faculties well-nigh valueless."

"Foresight!" I repeated. "Certainly you cannot mean that it is given you
to know the future?"

"It is given not only to us," was the answer, "but, so far as we know,
to all other intelligent beings of the universe except yourselves. Our
positive knowledge extends only to our system of moons and planets
and some of the nearer foreign systems, and it is conceivable that the
remoter parts of the universe may harbo