I mentioned the matter to the Duke and it made him smile.  He said it was a quite simple thing-he had it at home.  I was eager to bargain for the secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for.  He said: 

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an X-ray to an angle-value of 8.4 and refract it with a parabolism, and there you are?”

Upon my word, I had never thought of that simple thing!  You could have knocked me down with a feather.

We rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon it.  The result was beyond my dreams.  The field stretched miles away, green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills.  And there was a great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting.  We had hit a lucky moment, evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that.  At the front where the chief banner flew there was a large and showy tent, with showy guards on duty, and about it were some other tents of a swell kind.

The warriors—­particularly the officers—­were lovely to look at, they were so trim-built and so graceful and so handsomely uniformed.  They were quite distinct, vividly distinct, for it was a fine day, and they were so immensely magnified that they looked to be fully a finger-nail high.—­[My own expression, and a quite happy one.  I said to the Duke:  “Your Grace, they’re just about finger-milers!” “How do you mean, m’lord?” “This.  You notice the stately General standing there with his hand resting upon the muzzle of a cannon?  Well, if you could stick your little finger down against the ground alongside of him his plumes would just reach up to where your nail joins the flesh.”  The Duke said “finger-milers was good"-good and exact; and he afterward used it several times himself.]—­Everywhere you could see officers moving smartly about, and they looked gay, but the common soldiers looked sad.  Many wife-swinks ["Swinks,” an atomic race] and daughter-swinks and sweetheart-swinks were about—­crying, mainly.  It seemed to indicate that this was a case of war, not a summer-camp for exercise, and that the poor labor-swinks were being torn from their planet-saving industries to go and distribute civilization and other forms of suffering among the feeble benighted somewhere; else why should the swinkesses cry?

The cavalry was very fine—­shiny black horses, shapely and spirited; and presently when a flash of light struck a lifted bugle (delivering a command which we couldn’t hear) and a division came tearing down on a gallop it was a stirring and gallant sight, until the dust rose an inch —­the Duke thought more—­and swallowed it up in a rolling and tumbling long gray cloud, with bright weapons glinting and sparkling in it.