204 M STARRY REALMS. 



shall have gone ten yards I have gone 1,000 yards. I do 

 not assert that my speed has been invariable sometimes 

 it has been faster, sometimes it has been slower ; but I 

 have generally done my million miles a day at the very 

 least. Such has been my career, not for hours or days, 

 but for years and for centuries, probably for untold ages. 

 And the grand catastrophe in which I vanished has been 

 befitting to a life of such transcendent excitement and 

 activity ; I have perished instantly, and in a streak of 

 splendour. In the course of my immemorial wanderings I 

 have occasionally passed near some of the great bodies in 

 the heavens ; I have also not improbably in former years 

 hurried by that globe on which you live. On those occa- 

 sions you never saw me, you never could have seen me, 

 not even if you had used the mightiest telescope that 

 has ever been directed to the heavens. But too close an 

 approach to your globe was at last the occasion of my 

 fall. You must remember that you live on the earth 

 buried beneath a great ocean of air. Viewed from out- 

 side space your earth is seen to be a great ball, every- 

 where swathed with this thick coating of air. Be- 

 yond the appreciable limits of the air stretches the open 

 space, and there it is that my prodigious journeys 

 have been performed. Out there we have a freedom to 

 move of which you who live in a dense atmosphere have 

 no conception. Whenever you attempt to produce rapid 

 motion on the earth, the resistance of your air largely 

 detracts from the velocity that would be otherwise attain- 

 able. Your quick trains are impeded by air, your artillery 

 ranges are shortened by it. Movements like mine would 

 be impossible in air like yours. 



