tude, was filled
with a beaming point of light, and I walked in these noble corridors
between reduced patterns of the universe of stars. I can hardly tell you
how astonished and entranced I was.

"I had for the first time since I reached the planet the impulse of
speech, and I raised my hands with that motion of snapping the fingers,
which you recall was characteristic of me on earth, and _spoke_. I
cried, 'Here is my home.'

"As my hands dropped to my sides I felt resistance. I looked down upon
myself and could behold the changing surfaces of my body. Under this
completing stroke of volition the work begun upon the Hill of the
Phosphori and the Chorus Hall in reducing the intangible spirit fluid to
corporeal expression was now hastening to an end. I do not stop here to
consider the reflections this suggests as to the nature of matter, those
abstruse speculations we indulged in so often over the pages of Muir and
Helmholz and Tait and Crookes.

"I had reached the ascending stairway, when my hand--for hand it now
seemed to be--was taken in a friendly pressure, and I turned and saw a
tall figure with a face of extreme nobility, somewhat scarred, I
thought, dressed in the usual Martian attire of a flowing tunic and
closely fitting body clothing. He said in English, 'You are from the
earth as I am.'

"My son, how can I, in this dull, mechanical method of conversation with
you, ignorant, indeed, whether the magnetic waves loaded with my
message, are traversing or not the millions of miles of space to your
ear, how can I make you realize the wonderful and blessed feelings of
amazement and happiness that the stranger's words brought me. Here I
was, a disembodied soul from Earth, which at that moment I only dimly
recalled, undergoing the strange process of re-establishment in flesh
and blood, and slowly appropriating those natural appetites which come
with flesh and blood, a waif of spiritual being in the great voids of
creation, impelled by some implanted power of affinity to this remote,
strange, phantasmal and unreal place, overwhelmed in a stupor of
confusion, like some awakening patient from the vertigo of a terrifying
dream!

"I looked upon my friend, and in the rapidly rising flood of emotions
that came with the acting members of my body, flushed and throbbing with
excitement, and with a wild joy besides, I flung myself upon his neck
and pressed him with arms that seemed once more those natural physical
ties that