ld confessed impossibilities, and if my neighbours witnessed them
they would pronounce them to be either impostures or illusions."

"Then," said I, somewhat indignantly, "they must prefer inferences
from facts to facts themselves, and the deductions of logic to the
evidence of their senses. Yet, if that evidence be wanting in
certainty, then, since no chain can be stronger than its weakest
point, inferences are doubly uncertain; first, because they are drawn
from facts reported by sense, and, secondly, because a flaw in the
logic is always possible."

"Do not repeat that out of doors," he answered, smiling. "It is not
permitted here to doubt the infallibility of science; and any one who
ventures to affirm persistently a story which science pronounces
impossible (like your voyage through space), if he do not fall at once
a victim to popular piety, would be consigned to the worse than living
death of life-long confinement in a lunatic hospital."

"In that case I fear very much that I have little chance of being put
under the protection of your laws, since, whatever may be the
impression of those who have seen me, every one else must inevitably
pronounce me non-existent; and a nonentity can hardly be the subject
of legal wrong or have a right to legal redress."

"Nor," he replied, "can there be any need or any right to annihilate
that which does not exist. This alternative may occupy our Courts of
Justice, for aught I know, longer than you or I can hope to live. What
I have asked is that, till these have decided between two
contradictory absurdities, you shall be provisionally and without
prejudice considered as a human reality and an object of legal
protection."

"And who," I asked, "has authority _ad interim_ to decide this point?"

"It was submitted," he answered, "in the first place, to the Astynta
(captain, president) who governs this district; but, as I expected, he
declined to pronounce upon it, and referred it to the Mepta (governor)
of the province. Half-an-hour's argument so bewildered the latter that
he sent the question immediately to the Zampta (Regent) of this
dominion, and he, after hearing by telegraph the opening of the case,
at once pronounced that, as affecting the entire planet, it must be
decided by the Campta or Suzerain. Now this gentleman is impatient of
the dogmatism of the philosophers, who have tried recently to impose
upon him one or two new theoretical rules which would limit the amount