He explained the motives and conduct of his countrymen with such perfect coolness, such absence of surprise or indignation, that I felt slightly nettled, and answered sarcastically, "If the slaughter of strangers whose account of themselves appears improbable be so completely a matter of course among you, I am at a loss to understand your own interference, and the treatment I have received from yourself and your family, so utterly opposite in spirit as well as in form to that I met from everybody else." "I do not," he answered, "always act from the motives in vogue among my fellow-creatures of this planet; but why and how I differ from them it might not be well to explain. It is for the moment of more consequence to tell you why you have been kept in some sense a prisoner here. My neighbours, independently of general laws, are for certain reasons afraid to do me serious wrong. While in my company or in my dwelling they could hardly attempt your life without endangering mine or those of my family. If you were seen alone outside my premises, another attempt, whether by the asphyxiator or by a destructive animal, would probably be made, and might this time prove successful. Till, therefore, the question of your humanity and right to the protection of our law is decided by those to whom it has been submitted, I will beg you not to venture alone beyond the bounds that afford you security; and to believe that in this request, as in detaining you perforce heretofore, I am acting simply for your own welfare, and not," he added, smiling, "with a view to secure the first opportunity of putting your relation to our race to the tests of the dissecting table and the laboratory." "But my story explained everything that seemed inexplicable; why was it not believed? It was assumed that I could not belong to Mars; yet I was a living creature in the flesh, and must therefore have come from some other planet, as I could hardly be supposed to be an inhabitant of space." "We don't reason on impossibilities," replied my friend. "We have a maxim that it is more probable that any number of witnesses should lie, that the senses of any number of persons should be deluded, than that a miracle should be true; and by a miracle we mean an interruption or violation of the known laws of nature." "One eminent terrestrial sceptic," I rejoined, "has said the same thing, and masters of the science of probabilities have supported his assertion. But a miracle should be a violation not merely of the known but of all the laws of nature, and until you know all those laws, how can you tell what is a miracle? The lifting of iron by a magnet—I suppose you have iron and loadstones here as we have on Earth—was, to the first man who witnessed it, just as complete a violation of the law of gravity as now appears my voyage through space, accomplished by a force bearing some relation to that which acts through the magnet."