It was the inhabitants of other stars that they were trying to emulate or gain as friends. They could live in the intervening ether and found movement through it rapid as thought. Their highest wishes, the subjects of their imagination, encountered little obstacle or friction in the accomplishment. They were evidently nearer omnipotence over the forces around them than they had ever been. Their bodies were so much dematerialised that they were not far from the state and texture of their souls. Thought was not clogged with an earthy matter so different from itself as to hold it down till freed by death. Yet I could see that there were limits to their actions. The forces of other worlds and the conditions of interstellar space narrowed and checked their activity. They could not yet create; they could only transform what already existed, for there I saw one pair, moulding a creature perfect according to their ideals and trying to breathe life into it, and not yet could they know the centre of all being. The path was still upwards and onwards. Their activity was no longer restricted to the immediate confines of the earth. Beyond and above it they soared till it became an insignificant speck of light in the azure, busily exploring the universes that strewed infinity and finding out the higher and ever higher life that inhabited them. I could see them marking on their itineraries of the sky the orbs to be avoided for their degenerate or degraded forms of life or energy. Every grade of existence was found and indicated by brighter light or deeper shadow. They loved to linger over those orbs whose dwellers were but a step above them, watching their actions and thoughts and learning their higher ambitions. At a distance they hovered over the worlds of beings many stages beyond them in the evolution of energy, afraid lest they might be repulsed as degenerate. As they watched, their longing study helped them to rise more rapidly in the scale of being, and back they would come to Limanora with new thoughts and methods and set themselves thus equipped to work out with increasing pace their own evolution. This vast widening of their horizon was evidently an era in their history, it added such lightning swiftness to their rise in the scale of existence, it gave them such power of fulfilling whatever they designed or even imagined. Nobler and nobler ideals remained to be discovered in every corner of the cosmos. They had only to sail out and investigate, and then, returning with higher thoughts and ways of life, mould their being to them. And to die,--what was it now but to slough off a trammelling form? Death was to them an ecstasy. Every moment of advance was to them a death, a death of the old, a realisation of the nobler and higher.