a muscle, serve to design words. As they use all their body
in speaking in this fashion, they have to go naked in order to make
themselves clearly understood. When they are engaged in an exciting
conversation they seem to be creatures shaken by some wild fever.

Instead of sending me at once to the Queen of the Moon, the man who had
captured me earned a considerable amount of money by taking me every
afternoon to the houses of the rich people. There I was compelled to
jump and make grimaces, and stand in ridiculous attitudes in order to
amuse the crowds of guests who had been invited to see the antics of the
new animal.

But one day, as my master was pulling the rope around my neck to make me
rise up and divert the company, a man came and asked me in Greek who I
was. Full of joy at meeting someone with whom I could talk, I related to
him the story of my voyage from the Earth.

"I cannot understand," I said, "how it was I rose up to the Moon when my
machine broke down and fell to the Earth."

"That is easily explained," he said. "You had got within the circle of
lunar influence, in which the Moon exerts a sort of sucking action on
the fat of the body. The same thing often happens to me. Like you, I am
a stranger on the Moon. I was born on the Sun, but, being of a roving
disposition, I like to explore one planet after another. I have
travelled a good deal in Europe, and conversed with several persons
whose names you no doubt know. I remember that I was once famous in
ancient Greece as the Demon of Socrates."

"Then you are a spirit?" I exclaimed.

"A kind of spirit," he replied. "I was one of the large company of the
Men of the Sun who used to inhabit the Earth under the names of oracles,
nymphs, woodland elves, and fairies. But we abandoned our world in the
reign of the Emperor Augustus; your people then became so gross and
stupid that we could no longer delight in their society. Since then I
have stayed on the Moon. I find its inhabitants more enlightened than
the inhabitants of the Earth."

"I don't!" I exclaimed. "Look how they treat me, as if I were a wild
beast! I am sure that if one of their men of science voyaged to the
Earth, he would be better received than I am here."

"I doubt it," said the Man of the Sun. "Your men of science would have
him killed, stuffed, and put in a glass case in a museum."

_II.--The Garb of Shame_

At this point our conversation was broken off by my keeper. He saw that
t