the pleasure I should otherwise have had in the contemplation of my
host's country-seat, and the astonishing perfection of the machinery
by which his farming operations were conducted. The house differed in
appearance from the massive and sombre building which Aph-Lin inhabited
in the city, and which seemed akin to the rocks out of which the city
itself had been hewn into shape. The walls of the country-seat
were composed by trees placed a few feet apart from each other, the
interstices being filled in with the transparent metallic substance
which serves the purpose of glass among the Ana. These trees were all in
flower, and the effect was very pleasing, if not in the best taste. We
were received at the porch by life-like automata, who conducted us
into a chamber, the like to which I never saw before, but have often on
summer days dreamily imagined. It was a bower--half room, half garden.
The walls were one mass of climbing flowers. The open spaces, which
we call windows, and in which, here, the metallic surfaces were slided
back, commanded various views; some, of the wide landscape with its
lakes and rocks; some, of small limited expanses answering to our
conservatories, filled with tiers of flowers. Along the sides of the
room were flower-beds, interspersed with cushions for repose. In the
centre of the floor was a cistern and a fountain of that liquid light
which I have presumed to be naphtha. It was luminous and of a roseate
hue; it sufficed without lamps to light up the room with a subdued
radiance. All around the fountain was carpeted with a soft deep lichen,
not green (I have never seen that colour in the vegetation of this
country), but a quiet brown, on which the eye reposes with the same
sense of relief as that with which in the upper world it reposes
on green. In the outlets upon flowers (which I have compared to our
conservatories) there were singing birds innumerable, which, while we
remained in the room, sang in those harmonies of tune to which they are,
in these parts, so wonderfully trained. The roof was open. The whole
scene had charms for every sense--music form the birds, fragrance from
the flowers, and varied beauty to the eye at every aspect. About all was
a voluptuous repose. What a place, methought, for a honeymoon, if a Gy
bride were a little less formidably armed not only with the rights
of woman, but with the powers of man! But when one thinks of a Gy, so
learned, so tall, so stately, so much a