hurling toward Mars.  Its contact seemed more and more imminent.  I felt a nameless terror.  The thought of isolation in this new world, the unknown awfulness of this planetary disturbance, the sudden extinction of the hopes that were feeding my heart with a new life, and the forecasting of the impossible agonies of universal death in this great, strange place I had so wonderfully entered, overcame me.  I fell sobbing to the glassy floor on which I was standing.  It was again a new proof of my assumption of the ecstatic nature of these children of light and music, impulse and inspiration.

“The convulsion passed.  I felt stronger, and was quickened with a keenly prudent determination to escape from the city, find my way back to the Hill of Observation, and if possible, send you, my son, my last experience before all had become silence.

“I could see the regular ascent of the rockets from the distant hill.  I found the streets about me almost emptied, the white, lustrous river of life had passed.  I descended to the pavement.  The way past the splendid Amphitheatre was easily found, and then I hastened, guided by a dumb instinct of direction, toward the still ascending rockets.  I came to the broad Boulevard which led to the Hill of Observation, and went on, now plainly controlled by the sweeping avenue of lamps about, and in front of me.

“I shall not pause to recount the success of my application to the astronomers to use the transmitters of the wireless telegraphy, which are as fully perfected here as at the City of Scandor.

“As my message ends, the dawn ascends from the wide margins of the Ribi country.  I am stunned with drowsiness.  The Sun’s rays have extinguished the scintillant peril in the skies.  But the order has gone forth to leave the City, to camp upon the hills, the City of Scandor is doomed, and the area of destruction it embraces is the diametral measure of the——­”

I heard no more.  Overcome with fatigue, exposure and increasing pulmonary weakness, of which I had had painful premonitions, I fainted at the table, and fell to the floor of the damp and inclement room.

My assistants aver that the transmission ceased almost the next moment upon my collapse, and the unfinished sentence of my father’s message can be readily understood as implying that the foreign body, or Swarm, which was destined to strike Mars, had been determined as having about the amplitude of the City of Scandor.

Days lengthened into weeks, weeks to months, but though unflinchingly watched by night and day, no further message was received.  I had become weaker, pale and lifeless.  The terrible malady made its inroads upon a frame unable to meet its savage or insidious attacks.  This weakness was aggravated by the excitement produced by the singular experience I had passed through.  My nerves had undergone a strain quite unusual, and the interior sense of elation, reacting its fits of extreme mental despondency dislocated my system, and accelerated the gliding virus of disease inundating the capillaries of circulation and breaking down the tissues with fever and consumption.