I had not spoken, but I distinctly heard this sentence, which seemed like a reply to my inward conversation. Two of the dwellers upon Mars were looking at and had understood me, by virtue of that sixth sense of magnetic perception to which I before alluded. I was somewhat confused, and, I must confess, deeply wounded, by this apostrophe. "After all," I thought, "I love the Earth; it is my country, and I am patriotic." My two neighbors both began to laugh. "Yes," answered one of them, with unexpected good-nature, "you are patriotic; any one might know that you have just come from the Earth." And the elder added,-- "Let your compatriots alone. They will never be any more intelligent or less blind than they are now. They have been there eighty thousand years already, and you yourself acknowledge that they are not yet capable of thinking. It is really very absurd of you to look at the Earth with such sorrowful eyes. It is too foolish." Dear reader, have you not, in your journey through the world, sometimes met men who were puffed up with imperturbable pride, and who thought themselves sincerely and unquestionably above all the rest of the world? When these proud personages find themselves face to face with anything superior, they are instantly hostile to it, they cannot endure it. Very well. In the preceding dithyramb (of which you have had but a very poor translation), I felt myself greatly superior to earthly humanity, since I felt pity for it, and invoked for it better days. But when these two inhabitants of Mars pitied me, and I thought I discovered in them a cold superiority to myself, I was for a moment like these foolish, proud people. My blood gave one bound, and, restraining myself by a remnant of French politeness, I opened my mouth to say,-- "After all, gentlemen, the inhabitants of the Earth are not as stupid as you appear to think, but are worth perhaps more than you." Unfortunately they did not give me time to begin my sentence, inasmuch as they had understood it all while it was being formed by the vibration of the substance of the brain. [Illustration]