ions difficulties became light.

Meanwhile, the first essential was breakfast of some kind. I arose,
stretched, put on my half-dried clothes, and mounting a low hummock on
the forest edge looked around. The sun was riding up finely into the
sky, and the sea to the eastward shone for leagues and leagues in the
loveliest azure. Where it rippled on my own beach and those of the low
islands noted over night, a wonderful fire of blue and red played on
the sands as though the broken water were full of living gems. The sky
was full of strange gulls with long, forked tails, and a lovely little
flying lizard with transparent wings of the palest green--like those of
a grasshopper--was flitting about picking up insect stragglers.

All this was very charming, but what I kept saying to myself was
"Streaky rashers and hot coffee: rashers and coffee and rolls," and,
indeed, had the gates of Paradise themselves opened at that moment I
fear my first look down the celestial streets within would have been
for a restaurant. They did not, and I was just turning away
disconsolate when my eye caught, ascending from behind the next bluff
down the beach, a thin strand of smoke rising into the morning air.

It was nothing so much in itself--a thin spiral creeping upwards
mast-high, then flattening out into a mushroom head--but it meant
everything to me. Where there was fire there must be humanity, and
where there was humanity--ay, to the very outlayers of the
universe--there must be breakfast. It was a splendid thought; I rushed
down the hillock and went gaily for that blue thread amongst the reeds.
It was not two hundred yards away, and soon below me was a tiny bay
with bluest water frilling a silver beach, and in the midst of it a
fire on a hearth dancing round a pot that simmered gloriously. But of
an owner there was nothing to be seen. I peered here and there on the
shore, but nothing moved, while out to sea the water was shining like
molten metal with not a dot upon it!--what did it matter? I laughed
as, pleased and hungry, I slipped down the bank and strode across the
sands; it pleased Fate to play bandy with me, and if it sent me
supperless to bed, why, here was restitution in the way of breakfast.
I took up a morsel of the stuff in the kettle on a handy stick and
found it good--indeed, I knew it at once as a very dainty mess made
from the roots of a herb the Martians greatly liked; An had piled my
platter with it when we suppe