We were a strange household, but after a time, except for having my meals alone, I found I could move about pretty freely. Once Toroh brought me my electric torch, and, making sure I did not aim it at him, he made me light it. I knew he believed it a weapon. I thought this a good chance to convince him I was friendly. I smiled and shined it into my eyes, to show him it was harmless. He grunted and, taking the flashlight from me, tossed it across the room, indicating it was of no use or further interest. Then he produced my Collinger and made me show him how to operate it. But he was too clever to let me hold it; he did not let it get out of his hands. When he had fired it at a mark out the doorway, he grunted again and laid it on the snow. At a distance of twenty feet he stood with some object in his hand which he did not show me. Abruptly the Collinger flew into fragments! All its cartridges had been exploded simultaneously. The bullets whistled past us, startling Toroh as much as they did me. Later I learned he had exploded it by something akin to radio. He picked up the remains and when he got back into the house, he tossed my broken weapon away disdainfully. It was the attitude a soldier of today might have toward an Indian warrior and his bow and arrow. Toroh, I learned later, thought I had come from another planet. He had seen my plane the morning I hovered over the house. No one from another planet had been to the earth for centuries. But history told of them, and he thought I was one of them, come again. He treated me kindly enough--probably because I did not anger him or cross him in any way. But I had seen him strike the girl in the face, and one day he struck the woman. I have never seen such a look of sullen, repressed hatred as she gave him. She seemed to hate her father, too. Later, I often saw him cuff her when she annoyed him. I have so much to tell you. Toroh took two of his dogs and his sled and went away after about a week. He was gone a month, and during that time I stayed docilely in the house. I saw many opportunities when I might have escaped. But now I would not, without taking the girl--whose name, by the way, is Azeela--and I could not expose her to such danger as always seemed imminent. I must have convinced them all that I was harmless. No one paid me great attention except the woman, Koa. Often I would see her peering furtively at me from some distant doorway. Azeela soon became friendly, and since we both had nothing to do, she devoted herself to learning our language. I tried to learn hers and failed miserably. But she picked ours up with extraordinary rapidity--perhaps because her mind was quicker, her memory more retentive. And I think, also, because she has behind her the inherited instincts of knowledge through all the centuries from our own time-world forward. Anyway, within the month she could speak English freely enough for us to get along--with a quaint little accent that is wholly indescribable.