The next message came a few days after my interview with Miss Dodan.  It was a rainy day in November—­the spring time of that Southern land.  The register was heard by one of my assistants, Jack Jobson, a man who had unremittingly taken my place when I was absent, and who seemed more than anyone else dazed and wonder stricken over the experience we had.  He came running to me, a wild terror in his face, exclaiming, “It’s going again, sir.  Hurry!  It’s running slow.”  I sprang upstairs, and before I had reached it heard the telltale clicks.  It was not altogether a sheltered position, and as I reached the table I felt the bleak and chilly air penetrating the crevices of the window, a raw ocean breeze that in a few instants crept through my bones.  But I was again unconscious of everything; that marvellous ticking obliterated all thought of earth, its affairs, accidents, dangers, loves, hopes, despairs, all forgotten, swallowed up in the immeasurable revelation I was about to receive.

The second message began at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon of November 25, 1893, two months exactly after the first.  Its very opening sentences I failed to get.  It lasted late into the morning of the next day.  The strain of taking it was somehow singularly intense upon me.  I was taken from the table the next morning unconscious.  I had fainted at the close.  It began, as I received it, a few opening sentences having been lost: 

“...was sent to you I was in the City of Light, and now I am in the City of Scandor.

“The morning of that wonderful night in which I became a flesh and blood Martian, strong and young and beautiful, dawned fair.  My friend came for me, and we went together to the great ‘Commons’ of the Patenta, a superb hall where all the professors, investigators, and students in the great Academy sit at many tables.  This huge dining room is at the center of the group of buildings which make up the Patenta.  Corridors lead into it from the four sections of the Patenta, and as we entered, from the different sides there were many men and some women taking the ivory chairs at the side’s of the long tables of marble, on which rose in beautiful confusion of color crowded vases of fruits.

“Surrounding the room are niches instead of windows, and in each niche one noble symbolic figure in white or colored marble.

“Light fell in a torrent of glory through the faintly opalescent glass compartments of the ceiling, from which, at the intersection of the broad and long rafters of blue metal, hung chandeliers formed in branching arms with cup-like extremities, and holding spheres of the omnipresent phosphori.