nent, and two hundred millions of
intelligent citizens, accustomed from infancy to the daily use of
revolvers, should apply to a cowering universe the doctrine of the
Patriot Monroe.

When I had concluded, my host gently shook his head, and fell into a
musing study, making a sign to me and his daughter to remain silent
while he reflected. And after a time he said, in a very earnest and
solemn tone, "If you think as you say, that you, though a stranger, have
received kindness at the hands of me and mine, I adjure you to reveal
nothing to any other of our people respecting the world from which you
came, unless, on consideration, I give you permission to do so. Do you
consent to this request?" "Of course I pledge my word, to it," said
I, somewhat amazed; and I extended my right hand to grasp his. But
he placed my hand gently on his forehead and his own right hand on my
breast, which is the custom amongst this race in all matters of promise
or verbal obligations. Then turning to his daughter, he said, "And you,
Zee, will not repeat to any one what the stranger has said, or may say,
to me or to you, of a world other than our own." Zee rose and kissed her
father on the temples, saying, with a smile, "A Gy's tongue is wanton,
but love can fetter it fast. And if, my father, you fear lest a chance
word from me or yourself could expose our community to danger, by a
desire to explore a world beyond us, will not a wave of the 'vril,'
properly impelled, wash even the memory of what we have heard the
stranger say out of the tablets of the brain?"

"What is the vril?" I asked.

Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood
very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an
exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it
comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which,
in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as
magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have
arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been
conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus
intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:--

"I have long held an opinion," says that illustrious experimentalist,
"almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other
lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the
forces of matter are made manifest, have o