reach Mars. The biologists,
zoologists, botanists, geographers, and geologists rarely are booked at
the Registeries as coming from the Earth. Their lives may be prolonged
elsewhere, they seldom reach us.

"'There are some exceptions. The plants of Mars are numerous, its rocks
and animal life curious, and they are well understood. A few doctors
from the earth are here, but medicine and surgery are not so much
needed, yet in the study of life our philosophers have made great
strides. Your thinkers and poets, artists, composers, dramatists,
musicians, come here, but of all the wonderful students of Nature the
earth has produced, as far as I know or have heard, Lamarck and Agassiz,
Owen, and Cuvier alone have been reincarnated on our globe. And the
warriors and generals of the earth are unknown here.'

"We had reached a table unnoticed, unheard. There was a constant rush of
words about us. The melodic charm of the Martian tongue, like the soft
vocalization of Italian pleased me. If the Martians are without books
or papers, they possess all the resources of conversation. Animation,
pleasure, salutation, cheerfulness and joy was everywhere, the perfume
of flowers filled the air, the shafts of sunlight broken into the most
enticing iridescence filled the great noble rooms with lovely colors,
and the clear white tables, beautifully spread with fruit, seemed to
chasten appetite into something ethereal and rare.

"As we stood an instant at our places the people arose, and from some
distant and concealed place, so situated I afterwards learned, as to
gain access to all the dining halls, there came a swell and burst of
jubilant music. It was so fresh and free and bewitching in its glee and
ringing cadences, so consonant and accordant with the glad and
illustrious feeling of the place and time, that my heart seemed to leap
within me; and then it softened, and changing into notes of melodic
gravity, ended in a splendid outcry of soaring, piercing notes--the
salute to the morning. Long after the voices had finished, the rolling
notes of an organ continued the loud outburst.

"As we sat down, the conversation was again resumed and I noted then the
singular clearness and suavity of this Martian language. I must hasten
my narrative. I have so much to tell you. We ate the great cereal of
Mars--the Rint--a delicious food, in which, as it seemed to me, the
substance of a sort of rice was mingled with a creamy exudation in all
of which