for me in a minute--it was not often, she added
lightly, she had met one of my kind before. In fact, it was obvious
that simple person did actually take me for a being of another world,
and was it for me to say she was wrong? So adopting a dignity worthy
of my reputation I nodded gravely to her offer. She fetched from the
boat four little fishes of the daintiest kind imaginable. They were
each about as big as a hand and pale blue when you looked down upon
them, but so clear against the light that every bone and vein in their
bodies could be traced. These were wrapped just as they were in a
broad, green leaf and then the Martian, taking a pointed stick, made a
hollow in the white ashes, laid them in side by side, and drew the hot
dust over again.

While they cooked we chatted as though the acquaintance were the most
casual thing in the world, and I found it was indeed an island we were
on and not the mainland, as I had hoped at first. Seth, she told me,
was far away to the eastward, and if the woodmen had gone by in their
ships they would have passed round to the north-west of where we were.

I spent an hour or two with that amiable individual, and, it is to be
hoped, sustained the character of a spiritual visitant with
considerable dignity. In one particular at least, that, namely, of
appetite, I did honour to my supposed source, and as my entertainer
would not hear of payment in material kind, all I could do was to show
her some conjuring tricks, which greatly increased her belief in my
supernatural origin, and to teach her some new hitches and knots, using
her fishing-line as a means of illustration, a demonstration which
called from her the natural observation that we must be good sailors
"up aloft" since we knew so much about cordage, then we parted.

She had seen nothing of the woodmen, though she had heard they had been
to Seth and thought, from some niceties of geographical calculation
which I could not follow, they would have crossed to the north, as just
stated, of her island. There she told me, with much surprise at my
desire for the information, how I might, by following the forest track
to the westward coast, make my way to a fishing village, where they
would give me a canoe and direct me, since such was my extraordinary
wish, to the place where, if anywhere, the wild men had touched on
their way home.

She filled my wallet with dried honey-cakes and my mouth with sugar
plums from her little sto