"Perhaps in the remote past most of Xenephrene's surface was habitable. That is not known. Very little of it is habitable now, and there is only one main race--these Garlands. Only this one habitable region; they call it and the city here 'Garla.' The land very possibly is shrinking slowly to a lesser area; the race certainly is dying. Ten thousand years from now--" He shrugged. "What difference what the outcome may be then? Ten thousand years ago the Garlands were evidently a very progressive, 'modern' people. Their records show it." Father gazed at us earnestly. "I want you to understand this; it explains much. On earth we are climbing now from savagery to what we might call civilized modernity. The achievements of science--modern life--a growing complexity of existence--all that, to us on earth, has come to stand for advancement. "These Garlands passed that era of their development centuries ago. Their history, their records, their traditions speak eloquently of a past age when they lived in a machine-made world of science--the sort of world we are building so rapidly on earth. There is, not far from here, the ruined shell of one of their great cities. I fancy that in its prime our present-day New York or London would have seemed very primitive indeed. It is abandoned; in moldering ruins now. "There came a time when, growing decadent, or perhaps with a greater wisdom, the Garlands began to feel that they were in error. Leaders rose among them to preach a new philosophy of life. "You understand, I am speaking of changes that came, not quickly, but spread over centuries. These people--a single race they were then--were isolated upon their wandering world. Their science made them understand it more thoroughly than we understand our earth. They had built for themselves a complex civilization. They lived in bustling metal cities. Machines did their work. "But they found, strangely enough, that the more 'labor-saving' devices they invented, the more work there was to do. The cities were racked with disease. A hundred million people, crowded upon too small an area, living a complex artificial life, began to die faster than they were being born. There was little happiness; life was too complex; the rush to keep up with it was too great a strain." Father was smiling with a faintly ironical twist, but his voice was very earnest. "It is queer that one must come to another world to have a revealing mirror held up to one's self! They found out, their Garlands, that they were on the wrong track! It may have taken them centuries to become convinced of it--but when they decided they evidently did it very suddenly. In a lifetime or so.