There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave great beauty to their faces; and this they retained through the longest life and the most absorbing work. If there was one quality more than others which marked them as a race, it was their gentle and trustful outlook upon life, their naïve candour and transparency of character, their simple wonder and delight over any new discovery or invention. They never grudged the quiet admiration any word or action deserved. They never assumed that tone of superiority or sophistication, which, coming as it does from envy, jealousy, or malice, mars all praise or blame. They were children to one another in the limpidity of their life. And so their features, which had not often the attractions of regularity, had come to be transfigured by this single-heartedness; however old and experienced and wise they might be, all possessed this divine beauty of childhood. Sailors and backwoodsmen, men who have to spend long periods of their lives in comparative solitude, away from the sophistications of crowded life, often reveal traces of this childlike beauty of nature and expression. And it was this peculiar educational system and its long intervals of solitary meditation that kept the Limanorans children, simple and ingenuous, till the day each vanished in the ether. What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that one never felt lonely nor abandoned by his fellows during them. In a moment, there could be communication in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest friends, and within a brief space they would be at his side. They often resisted the associative impulse, through fear that it might be but the return of the old immaturity in disguise; and they knew that friendship was ever at call, and that all true solitudes deepened the current of life.