“Your size and form,” he said, “startled and surprised them.  I gather from what you have told me that on Earth there are many nations very imperfectly known to one another, with different dress, language, and manners.  This planet is now inhabited by a single race, all speaking the same tongue, using much the same customs, and differing from one another in form and size much less widely than (I understand) do men upon your Earth.  There you might have been taken for a visitor from some strange and unexplored country.  Here it was clear that you were not one of our race, and yet it was inconceivable what else you could be.  We have no giants; the tallest skeleton preserved in our museums is scarcely a hand’s breadth taller than myself, and does not, of course, approach to your stature.  Then, as you have pointed out, your limbs are longer and your chest smaller in proportion to the rest of the body; probably because, as you seem to say, your atmosphere is denser than ours, and we require ampler lungs to inhale the quantity of air necessary at each breath for the oxidation of the blood.  Then you were not dumb, and yet affected not to understand our language and to speak a different one.  No such creature could have existed in this planet without having been seen, described, and canvassed.  You did not, therefore, belong to us.  The story you told by signs was quickly apprehended, and as quickly rejected as an audacious impossibility.  It was an insult to the intelligence of your hearers, and a sufficient ground for suspecting a being of such size and physical strength of some evil or dangerous design.  The mob who first attacked you were probably only perplexed and irritated; those who subsequently interfered may have been animated also by scientific curiosity.  You would have been well worth anatomisation and chemical analysis.  Your mail-shirt protected you from the shock of the dragon, which was meant to paralyse and place you at the mercy of your assailants; the metal distributing the current, and the silken lining resisting its passage.  Still, at the moment when I interposed, you would certainly have been destroyed but for your manoeuvre of laying hold of two of your immediate escort.  Our destructive weapons are far superior to any you possess or have described.  That levelled at you by my neighbour would have sent to ten times your distance a small ball, which, bursting, would have asphyxiated every living thing for several yards around.  But our laws regarding the use of such weapons are very stringent, and your enemy dared not imperil the lives of those you held.  Those laws would not, he evidently thought, apply to yourself, who, as he would have affirmed, could not be regarded as a man and an object of legal protection.”

He explained the motives and conduct of his countrymen with such perfect coolness, such absence of surprise or indignation, that I felt slightly nettled, and answered sarcastically, “If the slaughter of strangers whose account of themselves appears improbable be so completely a matter of course among you, I am at a loss to understand your own interference, and the treatment I have received from yourself and your family, so utterly opposite in spirit as well as in form to that I met from everybody else.”