Genre War. Page - 9

this nervous little chap. There was a tray of drinks on a table beside him, from which he filled himself a stiff whisky-and-soda. He drank it off in three gulps, and cracked the glass as he set it down. 'Pardon,' he said, 'I'm a bit rattled tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead.' I sat down in an armchair and lit my pipe. 'What does it feel like?' I asked. I was pretty certain that I had to deal with a madman. A smile flickered over his drawn face. 'I'm not mad - yet. Say, Sir,

onderful world of ours. If this internalmolten mass came bursting out and cooled veryquickly it became granite; less quickly copper,less quickly silver, less quickly gold, and, aftergold, diamonds were made.Said the old priest, A diamond is a congealeddrop of sunlight.'' Now that is literally scientificallytrue, that a diamond is an actual depositof carbon from the sun. The old priest told AliHafed that if he had one diamond the size ofhis thumb he could purchase the county, and ifhe had a mine

o recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great

Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody