al incarnation--a new personal
experience, beginning with its new birth; a dream and a forgetting,
till it awakens again after the pangs of dissolution, and finds
itself a step further on the way to freedom.

Martia, it seems, came to our earth in a shower of shooting-stars a
hundred years ago. She had not lived her full measure of years in
Mars; she had elected to be suppressed, through some unfitness,
physical or mental or moral, which rendered it inexpedient that she
should become a mother of Martians, for they are very particular
about that sort of thing in Mars: we shall have to be so here some
day, or else we shall degenerate and become extinct; or even worse!

Many Martian souls come to our planet in this way, it seems, and
hasten to incarnate themselves in as promising unborn though just
begotten men and women as they find, that they may the sooner be
free to hie them sunwards with all their collected memories.

According to Martia, most of the best and finest of our race have
souls that have lived forgotten lives in Mars. But Martia was in no
hurry; she was full of intelligent curiosity, and for ten years she
went up and down the earth, revelling in the open air, lodging
herself in the brains and bodies of birds, beasts, and fishes,
insects, and animals of all kinds--like a hermit crab in a shell
that belongs to another--but without the slightest inconvenience to
the legitimate owners, who were always quite unconscious of her
presence, although she made what use she could of what wits they
had.

Thus she had a heavenly time on this sunlit earth of ours--now a
worm, now a porpoise, now a sea-gull or a dragon-fly, now some
fleet-footed, keen-eyed quadruped that did not live by slaying, for
she had a horror of bloodshed.

She could only go where these creatures chose to take her, since she
had no power to control their actions in the slightest degree; but
she saw, heard, smelled and touched and tasted with their organs of
sense, and was as conscious of their animal life as they were
themselves. Her description of this phase of her earthly career is
full of extraordinary interest, and sometimes extremely
funny--though quite unconsciously so, no doubt. For instance, she
tells how happy she once was when she inhabited a small brown
Pomeranian dog called "Schnapfel," in Cologne, and belonging to a
Jewish family who dealt in old clothes near the Cathedral; and how
she loved them and looked up to them--how she re