wift, immediately, "that
circumstances compel me to postpone my part of the contract. But, as we
are responsible for your loss, I will guarantee that the _Planet_ will
make it all right."

The professor did not answer. Absorbed, he followed the _High Tariff_ in
its capricious departure with tender interest.

When the three turned and stared about them, they stood palsied by the
terrible sight before them: a sight never permitted to mortal view
before, and we pray that such be withheld from the gaze of our poor race
henceforth forever.

The wide-awake, the proud, the busy city of Russell had vanished.
Russell in its short and meteoric career had spent hundreds of thousands
of dollars on its tall, iron, fireproof blocks, its steel grain
elevators, its gilded capitol, its granite churches, its hundred
factories, its indestructible depots. Where were they? Where was the
"busy hum of men"? Not a girder, not a column, not a trace of the
complicated iron vertebrae of this metal city was left to mourn the
grandeur of its structures. Not a corpse, not even a bone remained to
tell the tale of the death agony.

Stricken as dumb as the lower brute creation, this one poor girl, the
sole survivor of thirty thousand hopeful citizens, bereft of home, of
friends, of employment, of hope, of everything in life but this hideous
memory, uttered a low cry and sank senseless. Swift laid her gently on
the parched, cracked ground; it was yet heated as if a conflagration had
passed over the place. Where but five days ago haughty, frowning, iron
blocks of stores, of hotels and exchanges stood, there were ragged
gullies and deep fissures and jagged ravines, shining in the sunlight
with a black, streaked crust. The sight was dreary and dead and deserted
as if our travellers had been suddenly dropped upon the surface of the
moon. The ground was riven as by some prehistoric upheaval. It looked as
if subterranean springs of molten steel lava had spurted from the ground
and had melted the unhappy city in their onward path and had carried it
down in liquid solution to the lake.

Mr. Statis Ticks picked up a piece of this plutonian slag and examined
it attentively.

"I didn't know that brick would melt like this," he said. Then again:
"Here is platinum fused with iron and another substance I do not know."
In a second or two he added:

"I see no remains of glass. It must have evaporated." He then took a few
steps. "It is lucky," he said meditativ