“Let us get out of reach of this,” I said; and we left our planet, with its blank, desolate moon staring at it, as if it had turned pale at the sights and sounds it had to witness.

Presently the gilded dome of the State House, which marked our starting-point, came into view for the second time, and I knew that this side-show was over.  I bade farewell to the Common with its Cogswell fountain, and the Garden with its last awe-inspiring monument.

“Oh, if I could sometimes revisit these beloved scenes!” I exclaimed.

“There is nothing to hinder that I know of,” said my companion.  “Memory and imagination as you know them in the flesh are two winged creatures with strings tied to their legs, and anchored to a bodily weight of a hundred and fifty pounds, more or less.  When the string is cut you can be where you wish to be,—­not merely a part of you, leaving the rest behind, but the whole of you.  Why shouldn’t you want to revisit your old home sometimes?”

I was astonished at the human way in which my guide conversed with me.  It was always on the basis of my earthly habits, experiences, and limitations.  “Your solar system,” she said, “is a very small part of the universe, but you naturally feel a curiosity about the bodies which constitute it and about their inhabitants.  There is your moon:  a bare and desolate-looking place it is, and well it may be, for it has no respirable atmosphere, and no occasion for one.  The Lunites do not breathe; they live without waste and without supply.  You look as if you do not understand this.  Yet your people have, as you well know, what they call incandescent lights everywhere.  You would have said there can be no lamp without oil or gas, or other combustible substance, to feed it; and yet you see a filament which sheds a light like that of noon all around it, and does not waste at all.  So the Lunites live by influx of divine energy, just as the incandescent lamp glows,—­glows, and is not consumed; receiving its life, if we may call it so, from the central power, which wears the unpleasant name of ‘dynamo.’”

The Lunites appeared to me as pale phosphorescent figures of ill-defined outline, lost in their own halos, as it were.  I could not help thinking of Shelley’s

        “maiden
     With white fire laden.”

But as the Lunites were after all but provincials, as are the tenants of all the satellites, I did not care to contemplate them for any great length of time.

I do not remember much about the two planets that came next to our own, except the beautiful rosy atmosphere of one and the huge bulk of the other.  Presently, we found ourselves within hailing distance of another celestial body, which I recognized at once, by the rings which girdled it, as the planet Saturn.  A dingy, dull-looking sphere it was in its appearance.  “We will tie up here for a while,” said my attendant.  The easy, familiar way in which she spoke surprised and pleased me.