"'Oh, no,' returned Chapman, who pointed to the widening spaces in the beams between the slow Deimos and the fleeter flying Phobos, 'there are great differences. I have seen that. In materialization some seem badly put together, and these resemble our former terrestrial bodies. They grow old, they succumb to disease, they feel changes of weather and they have less vitality. Yes,' and he drew nearer, 'it is these unhappy misbirths in this spirit land who retain the sin of earth and cannot survive and get the _Kinkotantitomi_ or irreverently, as the earthling would say, the grand bounce. They are fired off the planet.' "He paused and laughed. How strange this almost human laugh sounded, and yet how pleasant! I looked at him with a deep affection. He noticed the impression, and quickly drawing me to him, said half timidly: "'Dodd, that sort of laugh and those words of mine just used, are not Martian, they don't belong to these rarefied beings here. They have a human or earthly taint, and they frighten me. I seem so lonely sometimes. My stray fun which I once enjoyed on earth must somehow be forgotten here. I feel so irreverent at times, so full of horse play, but I must keep up the high key and act like the rest. Indeed for the most of the time I feel as they do, I suppose, but sometimes that sort of ribaldry and feelings of the ludicrous that made us joke, and prank, and cut up in genial companionships come over me, and I am suffocating with a glee out of place to this exalted society. Ah! it's good to feel you, my friend, so fresh and new from earth. It's promised here in the learned talk I have heard, that those who disappear from Mars become reincorporated upon earth again, if they belong there. Well, I wouldn't mind if I got returned, wonderful and sweet and happy as all this seems. The dear, dear old Earth!' "He flung his arms around me, and our faces met, as if we had been lost brothers. A sort of terrifying melancholy invaded me. I was so distant from all I had known and loved, so distant from the surges we had watched from our observatory at Christ Church, so distant from the life of heat and clothing and genial domesticities; the life even, it might be called, of the daily paper, the novel, the new book, the life of politics and human history, and conventionality, the life of ups and downs, of sickness and health, of individual enterprise, of routine and mechanical fatigue, the life of exertion, contrast and social inequality, with its picturesqueness, its incessant interest, all this was now utterly removed by all the measureless leagues of icy space between me and the floating planet--the old sin-stricken Earth--that was shining in the Martian skies, so inconspicuous and tiny--so inaccessible.