matters of concern to us, but my leading task is being brought to its termination to-day.... "My supreme duty is to choose an earth-born King for our planet. Our constitution, which is the logical outcome of the most deliberate and far-seeing policy for many generations, requires the presence in our midst of a sovereign drawn from another sphere, and that sphere is of necessity the Earth, for we in Meleager hold no communication with any other planet in Cosmos. At intervals, as expediency or necessity may dictate, a new king has to be sought and found by the Meleagrian envoy on the Earth, whose task presents, as you may suppose, extreme, well-nigh insuperable difficulties. I am tied down by certain stringent rules, and to those rules I must strictly adhere. We demand a man of intelligence, a man of good birth and breeding, one of fine presence, and last of all an individual of a fair complexion and with blue eyes. This final condition may strike you as absurd, but then the Meleagrians are a dark race with dark skins and dark eyes and hair, as you may perceive in my own person; and in their fixed opinion their extraneous ruler must be the scion of an immortal stock, a member of the family of the Sun, who alone is worshipped in Meleager. Our priests by the aid of cunning devices and mystical potions, as also by means of the waters of a certain Fountain of Rejuvenation, whose exact locale is only known to our Arch-priest and a few chosen colleagues, can improve both mentally and bodily the individual who is translated and handed over to their care. Nevertheless, the raw material counts for a good deal--as you express it in one of your homely English proverbs: 'One cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear'; and on the same analogy even our skilful ministers of state would be unable to construct the true substance of a Child of the Sun-god out of an inferior Herthian mortal. The nicest caution has therefore to be observed in the work of selection. For nearly three years now I have been busily seeking, and can at last congratulate myself on having obtained the requisite material, the potential dross that will later be converted into pure gold. For some time past I have been on your track without arousing the smallest suspicion in your mind, and now at length I have grasped the favourable, the critical, the final moment in which I claim you for this most exalted, and indeed most sacred office....