I had not strength enough to reply or to advance, and still I dared to look at my friend, who was smiling at me. His dear face, lighted by the moonlight, was just as I had seen it when he left Paris for Christiania,--young, pleasant, and thoughtful, with a very animated look. I left the stairs, and felt a strong desire to rush to him and embrace him; but I dared not, and stood looking at him. When I had recovered my senses I cried, "Spero, it is you!" "I was there during your experiments," he replied, "and it was I who inspired you with the idea of comparing the intense violet with the intense red, for the speed of the luminous waves; only I was invisible, like the ultra-violet rays." "Can it really be so? Let me look at you and feel you." I passed my hands over his face and body, through his hair, and had precisely the same impression as if he had been a living being. My reason refused to admit the testimony of my eyes and hands and ears, yet I could not doubt that it was really he. There could not be such a resemblance. And then, too, my doubts would have disappeared at his first words, for he at once added,-- "My body is at this moment sleeping in Mars." "So," I said, "you still exist, you are living now, and you know at last the answer to the great problem that so distressed you? And Icléa?" "We will have a long talk," he answered; "I have many things to tell you." I sat down beside him on the edge of the wide parapet which rises above the old tower, and this is what I heard. * * * * * Shortly after the accident at Lake Tyrifiorden he had felt like a man who awakes from a long and heavy sleep. He was alone in midnight darkness on the border of a lake; he knew that he was living, but could neither see nor feel himself. The air did not affect him; he was not only light, but imponderable. Apparently, what remained of him was solely his thinking faculty. His first idea on trying to remember was that he had awakened from his fall by the Norwegian lake; but when the day broke he saw that he was in another world. The two moons revolving rapidly in the sky in opposite directions made him surmise that he was upon our neighbor, the planet Mars, and other evidences soon proved that he was correct. He lived there for a while in the spirit state, and recognized there the presence of a very beautiful humanity, in which the feminine sex reigns supreme, from an acknowledged superiority over the masculine sex. These organisms are light and delicate, their density of body very slight, their weight slighter still. On the surface of this world material force plays but a secondary part in nature; delicacy of sensation decides everything. There is a large number of animal species, and several human races. In all these species and races the feminine sex is stronger and handsomer (the strength consisting in the superiority of sensation) than the masculine sex, and it is she who rules the world.