These strange words he repeated in the same solemn tones three times; then, as the expectant multitude waited breathless for his discourse, stepped quietly down into the midst of them, every one afterward declaring that he passed within a pace of where himself had stood.  For a moment the crowd was speechless with surprise and disappointment, then broke into wild, fierce cries:  “Lynch him, lynch him!” and some have testified that they heard the word “crucify.”  Struggling into looser order, the infuriated mob started in mad pursuit; but each man ran a different way and the stranger was seen again by none of them.

THE LAND BEYOND THE BLOW

(After the method of Swift, who followed Lucian, and was himself followed by Voltaire and many others.)

THITHER

A crowd of men were assisting at a dog-fight.  The scene was one of indescribable confusion.  In the center of the tumult the dogs, obscure in a cloud of dust, rolled over and over, howling, yarring, tearing each other with sickening ferocity.  About them the hardly less ferocious men shouted, cursed and struck, encouraged the animals with sibilant utterances and threatened with awful forms of death and perdition all who tried to put an end to the combat.  Caught in the thick of this pitiless mob I endeavored to make my way to a place of peace, when a burly blackguard, needlessly obstructing me, said derisively: 

“I guess you are working pockets.”

“You are a liar!” I retorted hotly.

That is all the provocation that I remember to have given.

SONS OF THE FAIR STAR

When consciousness returned the sun was high in the heavens, yet the light was dim, and had that indefinable ghastly quality that is observed during a partial eclipse.  The sun itself appeared singularly small, as if it were at an immensely greater distance than usual.  Rising with some difficulty to my feet, I looked about me.  I was in an open space among some trees growing on the slope of a mountain range whose summit on the one hand was obscured by a mist of a strange pinkish hue, and on the other rose into peaks glittering with snow.  Skirting the base at a distance of two or three miles flowed a wide river, and beyond it a nearly level plain stretched away to the horizon, dotted with villages and farmhouses and apparently in a high state of cultivation.  All was unfamiliar in its every aspect.  The trees were unlike any that I had ever seen or even imagined, the trunks being mostly square and the foliage consisting of slender filaments resembling hair, in many instances long enough to reach the earth.  It was of many colors, and I could not perceive that there was any prevailing one, as green is in the vegetation to which I was accustomed.  As far as I could see there were no grass, no weeds, no flowers; the earth was