really perish on the beach at Dover; or did he evanish from his own world of men in order to start a new life under new conditions? His clothing, we know, was found lying on the bare ground carefully held down by stones and boulders, and in his pockets were some money and a few personal trifles of value. Nevertheless, it is just possible he may have changed into some other garb, and thus disguised have made his escape whither none could trace him. This second theory is however highly improbable, seeing that his age was over forty, his temperament on the whole normal, and his health indifferent; so that I merely mention it here to show that the suggestion has not escaped my own inquiring mind. The conclusion however which both the police and his relatives held was that A---- B---- had in some fit of frenzy or despair plunged naked into the sea, wherein he had been speedily drowned; for it was a cold stormy night. It is true the actual body was never recovered, but professional and amateur alike were agreed on the point of suicide whilst of unsound mind. That the manuscript is a literary jest perpetrated in the name of A---- B---- is also most unlikely, for though he was an author of some talent and repute, his mere name certainly had not the glamour requisite to draw special attention to any posthumous publication. At the risk therefore of being considered credulous, or even crazy, I have come to the deliberate decision that the whole marvellous story as set forth on the parchment is essentially true; and that the events described therein are not the figments of any imagination, sane or insane. If this is the case (which I do not for one moment doubt), then we possess an inestimable account of a planet other than our own. On the other hand, were it a fraud of an elaborate nature, as has been suggested, we have simply a treatise dealing with a Utopia in the stars, just one of those sterile semi-descriptive, semi-political effusions that the speculative human mind has produced from time to time. The record of Meleager and of its unique Secret, of which the author claims to know the existence but not the working details, is either a matter of surpassing interest, or else it is but a literary trifle, a jejune compound of material borrowed from Plato, Sir Thomas More, Rabelais, James Harington, Dean Swift, Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells, and Heaven only knows how many other inventors in a similar vein, both ancient and modern, English and foreign. Once more I repeat my full belief in the writer's veracity and in the substantial truth of all his many adventures. As I write this, I have lying on my desk before me that same strange metal cylinder, and that exquisitely prepared roll of vellum; and whenever I take these objects in my hands I really feel that I am fingering a message in a tangible form from a friend and fellow-mortal who has passed hence to another planet.