"With the labor of years, which you, Frank, will appreciate to some degree, Father has charted what for our own little ken we might call absolute points in Space. Landmarks, say, of this outer realm. With our whirling earth, the ever-changing planets and stars, only this outer realm seemed of fixed position. We could sometimes return our gaze to the same landmark--a tremendous crescent-shaped patch of silver, for instance, which several times we succeeded in re-finding. "It was near this patch at which I was one night gazing, when through some vagary of the ray bearing its image--or some difference in our crude apparatus--the scene suddenly clarified. And magnified as though at once I had leaped a million light-years toward it. "I saw then a magnified section of the larger scene. The patch of silver appeared now as a shimmering, opalescent liquid. A segment of shore-front; and this all in a moment, again magnified. Upon a bluish bank of soft vegetation, with the opal liquid beside it, I saw a girl half reclining. A girl of human form, but transfigured by a beauty more than human. A girl of a civilization behind our own--or perhaps one in advance--I do not know. She was robed in a short, simple garment more like a glistening, glowing silver veil than a dress. Her hair was long--a tangled dark mass. She reclined there in an attitude of ease and the abandonment of maidenly solitude. I say that she was more than beautiful--oh, Frank----" Brett's voice had suddenly lost the precise exactitude of the scientist. He seemed to have forgotten his father--Martt and Frannie; it was as though he were confiding his human emotions only to me. "Beautiful, Frank. A strange, wild beauty, with a curious ethereal aspect to it. I don't know--it's indescribable. Human--half human, but half divine." * * * * * He checked himself; the scientist in him again became uppermost; but though he now spoke with careful phrasing, his face remained flushed. "It was some moments before I saw additional details. And then I realized that the girl was not alone. Upon her bare feet were a sort of sandal with thongs crossing the ankle. And standing there beside one of her feet were two tiny human figures. In height, the length perhaps of her little foot. Men of human form; yet queerly grotesque; misshapen. One of them was in the act of reaching upward toward the tassel of her sandal cord where it dangled from her ankle; reaching as though to grasp it and draw himself upward. The other was watching; and both were grinning with gnomelike malevolence.