“I can grant your request in part, Mr. Jones,” I said at length; “you may read one hour; and if at the end of that period I do not think favorably of your article, you must promise to read no further.”

The old gentleman gave his parole at once, took a pair of great green spectacles from a sea-grass case, and blowing his nose again, rained pebbles and marine shells over the whole office.  When he took the manuscript from my hand, I saw the shining something distinctly on the top of his head; and when he sat back to read, he was a perfect copy of a dry old king-fish, looking through a pair of staring, glaring, green eyes.  Without more ado, and in a rippling kind of voice, as of the rushing of deep water, the old naturalist read the following introduction to a most wonderful manuscript: 

“At a very early period of my life I manifested an inclination for the study of the sciences.  In my eighteenth year I submitted a theory of inter-stellar telegraphing to the Gymnotian Academy.  It was my purpose to have placed the papers simultaneously before the scientific bodies of each of the seven planets in our constellation, but having no capital, the design failed, though I was complimented thereupon by the ‘Institute for Harmonizing the Universes,’ and elected a contributing member of that society.  For several years I petitioned annually for outfit and transportation to Scilly Islands,[2] on the Ecliptic Circle, where I purposed to develop my scheme of transferring a portion of our globe to the system of Orion.  In this I was opposed by the Palaeontologic Society, on the ground that some valuable fossils were presumed to be there; and Parliament, opining that my protests were subversive of the law of gravity, rejected them.  A number of projects, each of which, I firmly believe, would have benefited my kind, and facilitated correspondence between all created beings, terminated unfortunately, and my relatives at length placed it out of my power to continue these philanthropic exertions.  For some years I was denied the ear of man, and in the interval my hair grew gray and my body a trifle faint.  But the lofty impulses of youth survived.  My mind could not be imprisoned, and I held communication with the stars through the grating of my chamber in the still midnight.  At last the relief came.  I had long prayed for it!  My deliverer was Sirius, the brightest of the celestial intelligences.  He shone upon my window bars with an intense concentrated light, and they reddened and melted before daybreak.  I fled to Glasgow in the month of April, 184-, and obtained a captain’s clerkship on the whaler Crimson Dragon.

[Footnote 2:  This group of Scilly Islands is in the South Pacific; not off Land’s End.]