"Although Mars had completed not less than five thousand circuits about the sun since our ancestors were brought as prisoners to its surface, yet the memory of our distant home had never perished from the hearts of our race, and when we recognized you, as we believed, our own brothers, come to rescue us from long imprisonment, there was great rejoicing. The news spread from mouth to mouth, wherever we were in houses and families of our masters. We seemed to be powerless to aid you or to communicate with you in any manner. Yet our hearts went out to you, as in your ships you hung above the planet, and preparations were secretly made by all the members of our race for your reception when, as we believed, would occur, you should effect a landing upon the planet and destroy our enemies. "But in some manner the fact that we had recognized you, and were preparing to welcome you, came to the ears of the Martians." At this point the girl suddenly covered her eyes with her hands, shuddering and falling back in her seat. "Oh, you do not know them as I do!" at length she exclaimed. "The monsters! Their vengeance was too terrible! Instantly the order went forth that we should all be butchered, and that awful command was executed!" "How, then, did you escape?" asked the Heidelberg professor. Aina seemed unable to speak for a while. Finally mastering her emotion, she replied: "One of the chief officers of the Martians wished me to remain alive. He, with his aides, carried me to one of the military depots of supplies, where I was found and rescued," and as she said this she turned toward Colonel Smith with a smile that reflected on his ruddy face and made it glow like a Chinese lantern. "By God!" muttered Colonel Smith, "that was the fellow we blew into nothing! Blast him, he got off too easy!" The remainder of Aina's story may be briefly told. When Colonel Smith and I entered the mysterious building which, as it now proved, was not a storehouse belonging to a village, as we had supposed, but one of the military depots of the Martians, the girl, on catching sight of us, immediately recognized us as belonging to the strange squadron in the sky. As such she felt that we must be her friends, and saw in us her only possible hope of escape. For that reason she had instantly thrown herself under our protection. This accounted for the singular confidence which she had manifested in us from the beginning. Her wonderful story had so captivated our imaginations that for a long time after it was finished we could not recover from the spell. It was told over and over again, from mouth to mouth, and repeated from ship to ship, everywhere exciting the utmost astonishment.