“‘Goodness me!’ I cried; ‘what’s that?’

“My eye had just caught the figure of an exceptionally big and ungainly Selenite lying motionless among the stems, face downward.  We stopped.

“‘Dead?’ I asked. (For as yet I have seen no dead the moon, and I have grown curious.)

“‘No!’ exclaimed Phi-oo.  ’Him—­worker—­no work to do.  Get little drink then—­make sleep—­till we him want.  What good him wake, eh?  No want him walking about.’

“‘There’s another!’ cried I.

“And indeed all that huge extent of mushroom ground was, I found, peppered with these prostrate figures sleeping under an opiate until the moon had need of them.  There were scores of them of all sorts, and we were able to turn over some of them, and examine them more precisely than I had been able to previously.  They breathed noisily at my doing so, but did not wake.  One, I remember very distinctly:  he left a strong impression, I think, because some trick the light and of his attitude was strongly suggestive a drawn-up human figure.  His fore-limbs were long, delicate tentacles—­he was some kind of refined manipulator—­and the pose of his slumber suggested a submissive suffering.  No doubt it was a mistake for me to interpret his expression in that way, but I did.  And as Phi-oo rolled him over into the darkness among the livid fleshiness again I felt a distinctly unpleasant sensation, although as he rolled the insect in him was confessed.

“It simply illustrates the unthinking way in which one acquires habits of feeling.  To drug the worker one does not want and toss him aside is surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving in the streets.  In every complicated social community there is necessarily a certain intermittency of employment for all specialised labour, and in this way the trouble of an ‘unemployed’ problem is altogether anticipated.  And yet, so unreasonable are even scientifically trained minds, I still do not like the memory of those prostrate forms amidst those quiet, luminous arcades of fleshy growth, and I avoid that short cut in spite of the inconveniences of the longer, more noisy, and more crowded alternative.

“My alternative route takes me round by a huge, shadowy cavern, very crowded and clamorous, and here it is I see peering out of the hexagonal openings of a sort of honeycomb wall, or parading a large open space behind, or selecting the toys and amulets made to please them by the dainty-tentacled jewellers who work in kennels below, the mothers of the moon world—­the queen bees, as it were, of the hive.  They are noble-looking beings, fantastically and sometimes quite beautifully adorned, with a proud carriage, and, save for their mouths, almost microscopic heads.