direction, when plagues mowed down their millions of victims from east to west; where wide-spread displacements are impossible, there must be decimation by some cosmic means in order to let the light into the overpopulated regions. Another escape-valve was found for the pressure of those periods of temporary climatic change, when the western peoples were driven over the oceans to find a home. Emigration then came to mean transference of masses across the sea, at first to America, where there were other but weaker civilisations to be overcome, afterwards to lands and islands that were either empty or occupied by a few scattered savages. It was their circle of mist that saved the archipelago of Riallaro from the effect of these vast displacements of population. When every acre of land on the earth shall have been filled with its complement, and human forethought and ingenuity are still unequal to the sudden changes of cosmic meteorology, then famine and plague will be the only means of relieving the pressure. The Limanorans had no fear of such effects in their own island, except indirectly. For they had complete command of their own birth-rate and death-rate, and kept the numbers commensurate with all the purposes of their existence. Climate was to them as plastic as any material or force of nature, and the unexpected in meteorology was gradually becoming unknown. But they had a strong indirect interest in all inbursts of the cosmic. For the peoples of the other islands, the descendants of their ancient exiles, were as ready victims as ever to what seemed the caprices of the seasons and the years. And the frustration of the consequent movements involving the interests of the Limanorans absorbed more of their time and reserve energy than they desired. A violent tornado would obliterate the products of a year over the whole archipelago, and the fear of starvation would goad the inhabitants into expeditions in search of food, sometimes even towards the isle of devils. Again, hungry microbes, the spawn of some plague-stricken world, would float into the earth’s atmosphere and find new soil on the islands; and the dwellers would die so quickly that there was no time or room on their circles of earth for sepulture. Into the sea the festering dead would be thrown by the thousand, each bearing its myriad germs of contagion; the very fish that fed on them would die of the plague and bear its microbes to every shore; the currents and the winds, if left to their own bent, would sweep down the foul nests of contagion on the Limanorans; and it would take them weeks of superhuman effort to prevent the bacterial spawn from settling in their systems, and to cleanse the adjacent seas of all taint. The effort to prevent these disasters often wasted their store of force and checked their advance. It seemed to them therefore more economical of their energy to help in dispelling the original evil or making it swerve towards other oceans. For a time they considered it