was forced upon me when I realised that possessing no cognomen, no fixed
address, or rating, it would be the merest chance if I ever came across
her again.

Looking for my friendly guide and getting more and more at sea amongst
a maze of comely but similar faces, I made chance acquaintance with
another of her kind who cheerfully drank my health at the Government's
expense, and chatted on things Martian. She took me to see a funeral
by way of amusement, and I found these people floated their dead off on
flower-decked rafts instead of burying them, the send-offs all taking
place upon a certain swift-flowing stream, which carried the dead
away into the vast region of northern ice, but more exactly whither my
informant seemed to have no idea. The voyager on this occasion was old,
and this brought to my mind the curious fact that I had observed few
children in the city, and no elders, all, except perhaps Hath, being in
a state of sleek youthfulness. My new friend explained the peculiarity
by declaring Martians ripened with extraordinary rapidity from infancy
to the equivalent of about twenty-five years of age, with us, and then
remained at that period however long they might live; Only when they died
did their accumulated seasons come upon them; the girl turning pale, and
wringing her pretty hands in sympathetic concern when I told her there
was a land where decrepitude was not so happily postponed. The Martians,
she said, arranged their calendar by the varying colours of the seasons,
and loved blue as an antidote to the generally red and rusty character
of their soil.

Discussing such things as these we lightly squandered the day away, and
I know of nothing more to note until the evening was come again: that
wonderful purple evening which creeps over the outer worlds at sunset,
a seductive darkness gemmed with ten thousand stars riding so low in the