ad known him
utterly. Now they were dazed and forgetting: slow blood began to creep
again to their toes and to come again to its place under fingernails:
it came with intense pain: they forgot their spirits. Then all the woes
of Earth crowded their minds at once, so that they wished to weep, as
infants weep.

The Professor gave this mood time to change, as change it presently
did. For the warm blood came back and lit their cheeks, and a tingling
succeeded the pain in their fingers and toes, and a mild warmth
succeeded the tingling: their thoughts came back to the things of every
day, to mundane things and the affairs of the body. Therein they
rejoiced, and Morano no less than Rodriguez; though it was a coarse and
common body that Morano's spirit inhabited. And when the Professor saw
that the first sorrow of Earth, which all spirits feel when they land
here, had passed away, and that they were feeling again the joy of
mundane things, only then did he speak.

"Senor," he said, "beyond the path of Mars run many worlds that I would
have you know. The greatest of these is Jupiter, towards whom all that
follow my most sacred art show reverent affection. The smallest are
those that sometimes strike our world, flaming all green upon November
nights, and are even as small as apples." He spoke of our world with a
certain air and a pride, as though, through virtue of his transcendent
art, the world were only his. "The world that we name Argola," he said,
"is far smaller than Spain and, being invisible from Earth, is only
known to the few who have spoken to spirits whose wanderings have
surpassed the path of Mars. Nearly half of Argola you shall find
covered with forests, which though very dense are no deeper than moss,
and the elephants in them are not larger than beetles. You shall see
many wonders of smallness in this world of Argola, which I desire in
especial to show you, since it is the orb with which we who study the
Art are most familiar, of all the worlds that the vulgar have not
known. It is indeed the prize of our traffic in those things that far
transcend the laws that have forbidden them."

And as he said this the green flame in the bowl before him died, and he
moved towards his cupboard of wonder. Rodriguez hastily thanked the
Professor for his great courtesy in laying bare before him secrets that
the centuries hid, and then he referred to his own great unworthiness,
to the lateness of the hour, to the fatigue of t