“We consider the circumstances of your leaving the earth and your journey hither the most remarkable thing of the kind ever heard of, and we have nothing in our experience on which we can begin to build any scheme for sending you off on so long a flight through space. If you will only be content to stay here till we have progressed further with our investigations of the high civilization brought to light in our comet, perhaps we can help you. The remarkable people whose exalted condition is there represented may have had powers in this direction of which we cannot conceive. The subject will add even more zest to our researches. “Why do you desire to leave us so soon? You have seen but few of our notable improvements, and learned comparatively little of the practical workings of our high civilization. And then I have been hoping the doctor would come fully into our belief before he went away.” “If you could hear what he has told me,” I said, “you would see that he is already fit to be sent as a foreign missionary from this blessed world to the struggling earth.” “Good!” cried Thorwald. “I am delighted to hear it. If anything could reconcile us to the loss of your society, it is the knowledge that you will both he glad messengers of hope to your promising race. I rejoice that I have had a share in the work of preparing you for your mission. “And now, suppose we all humor your conceit and give you our parting words, as if the ship were at hand which was to sail the mighty void, and bear you safely to your distant home. “Come, wife, friends, the day is young and the air delightful. There is nothing to hasten us on our way. Let us ride leisurely along and take a little time to speed these earth-dwellers on their prospective journey with a few words of cheer. “Foedric, what advice have you to offer them before they take their leave of us?” Foedric was modest, as we had learned before, but he entered into Thorwald’s plan with evident pleasure, and said, addressing the doctor and me: “My friends from foreign skies, you do not need advice from me after you have been so long with Thorwald and Zenith, but I will send a message to your unfortunate fellow beings who have never had the pleasure of their acquaintance. When you have related your experiences and told them the condition in which you have found us, ask them to call us no longer Mars, but Pax, the world of peace. Our planet is red, but not with war. Its red is rather the blush of the dawn that ushers in the day of universal love. My word to men is to expect the advent of that day, and, expecting, to prepare for it. Useless, cruel, inhuman war must cease, with all strife and hatred and envy and bitter feeling; and then shall you begin to see the full measure of beauty in the song of the angels of which you have told us, and ‘Peace on earth’ will be a blessed fact and not a prophecy. Thorwald, I have finished.”