t of its jar seemed to have a
sort of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although,
of course it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our
earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then
making machines of them.

"Quite recently, too--I think it was on the eleventh or twelfth visit I
made to this apparatus--I had a curious light upon the lives of these
operatives. I was being guided through a short cut hither, instead of
going down the spiral, and by the quays to the Central Sea. From the
devious windings of a long, dark gallery, we emerged into a vast, low
cavern, pervaded by an earthy smell, and as things go in this darkness,
rather brightly lit. The light came from a tumultuous growth of livid
fungoid shapes--some indeed singularly like our terrestrial mushrooms,
but standing as high or higher than a man.

"'Mooneys eat these?' said I to Phi-oo.

"'Yes, food.'

"'Goodness me!' I cried; 'what's that?'

"My eye had just caught the figure of an exceptionally big and ungainly
Selenite lying motionless among the stems, face downward. We stopped.

"'Dead?' I asked. (For as yet I have seen no dead in the moon, and I have
grown curious.)

"'No!' exclaimed Phi-oo. 'Him--worker--no work to do. Get little drink
then--make sleep--till we him want. What good him wake, eh? No want him
walking about.'

"'There's another!' cried I.

"And indeed all that huge extent of mushroom ground was, I found, peppered
with these prostrate figures sleeping under an opiate until the moon had
need of them. There were scores of them of all sorts, and we were able to
turn over some of them, and examine them more precisely than I had been
able to previously. They breathed noisily at my doing so, but did not
wake. One, I remember very distinctly: he left a strong impression, I
think, because some trick the light and of his attitude was strongly
suggestive a drawn-up human figure. His fore-limbs were long, delicate
tentacles--he was some kind of refined manipulator--and the pose of his
slumber suggested a submissive suffering. No doubt it was a mistake for
me to interpret his expression in that way, but I did. And as Phi-oo
rolled him over into the darkness among the livid fleshiness again I felt
a distinctly unpleasant sensation, although as he rolled the insect in
him was confessed.

"It simply illustrates the unthinking way in which one acquires habits of
feeling. To drug the w