domed roofs and
lofty cupolas of glass.

"Isn't that just lovely!" she said, swinging her binoculars in every
direction. "Talk about your Park Lane and the houses round Central Park;
why, it's the Chicago Exposition, and the Paris one, and your Crystal
Palace, multiplied by about ten thousand, and all spread out just round
this one place. If we don't find these people nice, I guess we'd better
go back and build a fleet like this, and come and take it."

"There spoke the new American imperialism," laughed Redgrave. "Well,
we'll go and see what they're like first, shall we?"

The _Astronef_ dropped a little more slowly than the air-ship had done,
and remained suspended a hundred feet or so above her after she had
reached the ground. Swarms of human figures but of more than human
stature, clad in tunics and trousers or knickerbockers, came out of the
glass-domed palaces from all sides into the park. They were nearly all
of the same stature, and there appeared to be no difference whatever
between the sexes. Their dress was absolutely plain; there was no
attempt at ornament or decoration of any kind.

"If there are any of the Martian women among those people," said her
ladyship, "they've taken to rationals, and they've grown about as big as
the men."

"That's exactly what's happening on earth, you know, dear. I don't mean
about the rationals, but the women growing up, especially in America. I
come of a pretty long family----but, look!"

"Well, I only come to your ear," she said.

"And our descendants of ten thousand years hence----"

"Oh, don't bother about them!" she said. "Look; there's some one who
seems to want to communicate with us. Why, they're all bald! They
haven't got a hair among them--and what a size their heads are!"

"That's brains--too much brains, in fact. These people have lived too
long. I daresay they've ceased to be animals--civilised themselves out
of everything in the way of passions and emotions, and are just purely
intellectual beings, with as much human nature about them as Russian
diplomacy or those things we saw at the bottom of the Newton Crater. I
don't like the look of them."

The orderly swarms of figures, which were rapidly filling the park,
divided as he was speaking, making a broad lane from one of its
entrances to where the _Astronef_ was hanging above the air-ship. A
light four-wheeled vehicle, whose framework and wheels glittered like
burnished gold, sped towards them, driven