one of which is allotted to each twelve persons.  A great riot took place when an attempt was made by some fastidious and exclusive egotists to introduce partitions which should partially divide one portion of these receptacles into individual compartments.  The Saturnians boast that they have no paupers, no thieves, none of those fictitious values called money,—­all which things, they hear, are known in that small Saturn nearer the sun than the great planet which is their dwelling-place.

“I suppose that now they have levelled everything they are quiet and contented.  Have they any of those uneasy people called reformers?”

“Indeed they have,” said my attendant.  “There are the Orthobrachians, who declaim against the shameful abuse of the left arm and hand, and insist on restoring their perfect equality with the right.  Then there are Isopodic societies, which insist on bringing back the original equality of the upper and lower limbs.  If you can believe it, they actually practise going on all fours,—­generally in a private way, a few of them together, but hoping to bring the world round to them in the near future.”

Here I had to stop and laugh.

“I should think life might be a little dull in Saturn,” I said.

“It is liable to that accusation,” she answered.  “Do you notice how many people you meet with their mouths stretched wide open?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I do not know what to make of it.  I should think every fourth or fifth person had his mouth open in that way.”

“They are suffering from the endemic disease of their planet, prolonged and inveterate gaping or yawning, which has ended in dislocation of the lower jaw.  After a time this becomes fixed, and requires a difficult surgical operation to restore it to its place.”

It struck me that, in spite of their boast that they have no paupers, no thieves, no money, they were a melancholy-looking set of beings.

“What are their amusements?” I asked.

“Intoxication and suicide are their chief recreations.  They have a way of mixing the oxygen which issues in small jets from certain natural springs with their atmospheric nitrogen in the proportion of about twenty per cent, which makes very nearly the same thing as the air of your planet.  But to the Saturnians the mixture is highly intoxicating, and is therefore a relief to the monotony of their every-day life.  This mixture is greatly sought after, but hard to obtain, as the sources of oxygen are few and scanty.  It shortens the lives of those who have recourse to it; but if it takes too long, they have other ways of escaping from a life which cuts and dries everything for its miserable subjects, defeats all the natural instincts, confounds all individual characteristics, and makes existence such a colossal bore, as your worldly people say, that self-destruction becomes a luxury.”

Number Five stopped here.