ompletely perpendicular--smooth and shining.

Another hour and the action of the drug was beginning to slacken--the
walls encircling them, although steadily closing in, no longer seemed to
move with such rapidity. The pit as they saw it now was perhaps a
thousand feet in diameter and twice as deep. Far overhead the blackness
of the sky was beginning to be tinged with a faint gray-blue.

At the Chemist's suggestion they walked over near the center of the
circular enclosure. Slowly its walls closed in about them. An hour more
and its diameter was scarcely fifty feet.

The Chemist called his companions around him.

"There is an obstacle here," he began, "that we can easily overcome; but
we must all understand just what we are to do. In perhaps half an hour
at the rate we are growing this enclosure will resemble a well twice as
deep, approximately, as it is broad. We cannot climb up its sides,
therefore we must wait until it is not more than six feet in depth in
order to be able to get out. At that time its diameter will be scarcely
three feet. There are nine of us here; you can realize there would not
be room for us all.

"What we must do is very simple. Since there is not room for us all at
once, we must get large from now on only one at a time."

"Quite so," said the Big Business Man in a perfectly matter-of-fact
tone.

"All of us but one will stop growing now; one will go on and get out of
the pit. He will immediately stop his growth so that he can wait for the
others and help them out. Each of us will follow the same method of
procedure."

The Chemist then went on to arrange the exact quantities of the drugs
they were each to take at specified times, so that at the end they would
all be nearly the same size again. When he had explained all this to
Oteo and Eena in their native language, they were ready to proceed with
the plan.

"Who's first?" asked the Very Young Man. "Let me go with Loto."

They selected the Chemist to go first, and all but him took a little of
the other drug and checked their growth. The pit at this time was hardly
more than fifteen feet across and about thirty feet deep.

The Chemist stood in the centre of the enclosure, while his friends
crowded over against its walls to make room for his growing body. It was
nearly half an hour before his head was above its top. He waited only a
moment more, then he sprang upwards, clambered out of the pit and
disappeared beyond the rim. In a few mom