unremittingly.  It is true that we know these people are from your earth; they have reported all that to the Registeries, to whom I will soon conduct you; they yet retain strong memories of the earth, though it is confined more largely to knowledge than to experience.  In some, the Martian life and habit has almost obliterated their earthly notions and designs.  It is singular that of the scientific workers of the earth the astronomers, physicists, and chemists alone reach Mars.  The biologists, zoologists, botanists, geographers, and geologists rarely are booked at the Registeries as coming from the Earth.  Their lives may be prolonged elsewhere, they seldom reach us.

“’There are some exceptions.  The plants of Mars are numerous, its rocks and animal life curious, and they are well understood.  A few doctors from the earth are here, but medicine and surgery are not so much needed, yet in the study of life our philosophers have made great strides.  Your thinkers and poets, artists, composers, dramatists, musicians, come here, but of all the wonderful students of Nature the earth has produced, as far as I know or have heard, Lamarck and Agassiz, Owen, and Cuvier alone have been reincarnated on our globe.  And the warriors and generals of the earth are unknown here.’

“We had reached a table unnoticed, unheard.  There was a constant rush of words about us.  The melodic charm of the Martian tongue, like the soft vocalization of Italian pleased me.  If the Martians are without books or papers, they possess all the resources of conversation.  Animation, pleasure, salutation, cheerfulness and joy was everywhere, the perfume of flowers filled the air, the shafts of sunlight broken into the most enticing iridescence filled the great noble rooms with lovely colors, and the clear white tables, beautifully spread with fruit, seemed to chasten appetite into something ethereal and rare.

“As we stood an instant at our places the people arose, and from some distant and concealed place, so situated I afterwards learned, as to gain access to all the dining halls, there came a swell and burst of jubilant music.  It was so fresh and free and bewitching in its glee and ringing cadences, so consonant and accordant with the glad and illustrious feeling of the place and time, that my heart seemed to leap within me; and then it softened, and changing into notes of melodic gravity, ended in a splendid outcry of soaring, piercing notes—­the salute to the morning.  Long after the voices had finished, the rolling notes of an organ continued the loud outburst.

“As we sat down, the conversation was again resumed and I noted then the singular clearness and suavity of this Martian language.  I must hasten my narrative.  I have so much to tell you.  We ate the great cereal of Mars—­the Rint—­a delicious food, in which, as it seemed to me, the substance of a sort of rice was mingled with a creamy exudation in all of which was enclosed the flavor