ecome atrophied,
and for several hundred years the power of articulation had been wholly
lost. Infants for a few months after birth did, indeed, still emit
inarticulate cries, but at an age when in less advanced races these
cries began to be articulate, the children of the mind-readers developed
the power of direct vision, and ceased to attempt to use the voice.

The fact that the existence of the mind-readers had never been found
out by the rest of the world was explained by two considerations. In the
first place, the group of islands was small, and occupied a corner of
the Indian Ocean quite out of the ordinary track of ships. In the second
place, the approach to the islands was rendered so desperately perilous
by terrible currents, and the maze of outlying rocks and shoals, that
it was next to impossible for any ship to touch their shores save as a
wreck. No ship at least had ever done so in the two thousand years since
the mind-readers' own arrival, and the Adelaide had made the one hundred
and twenty-third such wreck.

Apart from motives of humanity, the mind-readers made strenuous
efforts to rescue shipwrecked persons, for from them alone, through the
interpreters, could they obtain information of the outside world. Little
enough this proved when, as often happened, the sole survivor of the
shipwreck was some ignorant sailor, who had no news to communicate
beyond the latest varieties of forecastle blasphemy. My hosts gratefully
assured me that, as a person of some little education, they considered
me a veritable godsend. No less a task was mine than to relate to them
the history of the world for the past two centuries, and often did I
wish, for their sakes, that I had made a more exact study of it.

It is solely for the purpose of communicating with shipwrecked strangers
of the talking nations that the office of the interpreters exists.
When, as from time to time happens, a child is born with some powers of
articulation, he is set apart, and trained to talk in the interpreters'
college. Of course the partial atrophy of the vocal organs, from
which even the best interpreters suffer, renders many of the sounds of
language impossible for them. None, for instance, can pronounce _v, f_,
or _s_; and as to the sound represented by _th_, it is five generations
since the last interpreter lived who could utter it. But for the
occasional inter-marriage of shipwrecked strangers with the island-ers,
it is probable that the s