of the orange and the peach.  This, with a fruit, a kind of milk, and many wines, forms the nourishment of the Martians.  The fruits are most various, and every hidden or patent fancy of the gourmet seems elicited or satisfied in them.  I cannot now describe them even if I recalled them.  One commended itself to my taste strongly, a sort of nodular banana, holding a fragrant nucleus, like a large strawberry immersed in a savory juice, and coated with a rind stripped from it by the hand.  It is of most stimulating qualities.  It is called Ana.

“Few implements are in use; the Rint is taken in short spoons and the fruit is usually manipulated with the fingers.  The milk and wine are drunk from the most ingeniously devised and ornamented glasses, napkins of the Tofa weed are used, a pale green cloth, and large bowls of acidified water in which floats a morsel of soap are served at the end of meals.  Great variety prevails, and individual fancy, taste, desire, or invention sway as with you on earth.

“The breakfast over, the companies arose and moved out in clusters and trains to the avocations of the day.  Many of these workers in the Patenta have houses throughout the city, while others living singly congregate in the numerous apartments, and enjoy these commons.  The extraordinary assemblage I saw here is repeated in the other great communal halls where the artists, philosophers and inventors congregate.  But the Halls are of quite different construction in each quarter of the City.

“Accompanying or associated with these Halls are the Courts of Announcement and Recreation.  Here lectures, conferences, entertainments, are given, and the people of the City flock in droves not infrequently accompanied by numbers of the new Spirits who here are often enabled to gain their final solidification; ‘Gell’ as the Martians say.

“My companion led me out of the Hall.  Men and women were moving slowly in various directions and as we made our way over the campus and between the many noble buildings I saw many of the lambent spirits half emergent into fleshly shapes accompanied by the watchers, who are in great numbers in the City, carrying over their arms the white and blue dresses with which to clothe them as the spirits fall into solid forms.

“Amongst these buildings I easily noted the marvellous observatories where objectives twenty feet in diameter are used with which the astronomers actually discern the life of our earth.  The reports they make from week to week of their inspection of the Solar system, and of the commotions, changes, births and demolition of Stars, are the sensations of Mars.  These Reports are read aloud in the Halls of Announcement and Recreation.  But astounding beyond belief, they photograph the surfaces of these distant bodies, and report in moving pictures the disturbances of the cosmic universe.  No wonder that the whole Mind, as it were, of Mars is concentrated on the fabulous results of their cosmic studies.