This great risk made the travellers dubious about taking so dangerous a creature on board, lest it should inadvertently come to grief against something, and end their careers suddenly whilst in space; but it was found, fortunately, that the variety of grub that needed the close presence of such a beast would not suit Earth, so they felt considerably relieved. They stayed on Jupiter a little over a month, during which time Godfrey gained all information possible with regard to the life-history and culture of the strange and interesting creatures, the rest of the party rendering valuable assistance. In a special room which had been made out of what had originally been three cabins, they fixed up apparatus and dishes and some strange boxes given them by the people of Kulametik, in which colonies of over fourteen million eggs or germs were coming forward. These would produce some millions each in the course of a year or so, and when Godfrey felt confident in proceeding with them and understood what to do in each phase of their existence, the visitors took their leave, full of gratitude to their kind hosts, and sailed away to Mars in order to return the borrowed Martian. Werran was quite overcome at the parting, as were they all, for in their close and friendly companionship and their intimate association in the realms of space they had all become like brothers. They tried to persuade him to stay with them, but his friends and family were in Mars and he would not hear of them being taken to Earth, which had not a very good reputation on the planet, though many were anxious to risk going there, or indeed anywhere, to escape the threatened doom, foolishly forgetting, as Werran had himself strongly pointed out at the time of the attempted seizure of the _Regina_, that the end could not come for many generations hence; the present inhabitants were, themselves, in no immediate danger, and there was certainly no necessity to be hysterical in the matter. He longed to go back to his native country, nor could they blame him, for there seems ingrained in the soul such an intense affinity with the land of one’s birth, that however far one may be removed from it, and no matter how happy one may be, there is felt such a strong yearning and love for one’s native land as makes the return to it the subject of many a longing heartache.