of mind.
What a fool he had been! He had but yielded to a fancy of a dreaming
girl, and put her even farther away from him while wasting half a
fortune! He would be better on the rugged shore of Lake Superior, where
the moods of men were healthy, and where were pure air and the fragrance
of the pines. There was a strong pull at his bell.

A telegraph boy entered, and this was on the message he bore:

Come to the observatory at once. Important.
MARSTON.

To seek a cab, to be whirled away at a gallop to the university, to
burst into Marston in his citadel, required but little time. The
professor was walking up and down excitedly.

"It has come! All the world knows it!" he shouted as Corbett entered,
and he grasped him by the hand and wrung it hardly.

"What has come?" gasped the visitor.

"What has come, man! All we had hoped for or dreamed of--and more! Why,
look! Look for yourself!"

He dragged Corbett to the eye-piece of the great telescope and made him
look. What the man saw made him stagger back, overcome with an emotion
which for the moment did not allow him speech. What he saw upon the
surface of the planet Mars was a duplication of the glittering figures
on the pampas of the South American Republic. They were in lines of
glorious light, between what appeared bands of a darker hue, provided,
apparently, to make them more distinct, and even at such vast distance,
their effect was beautiful. And there was something more, a figure he
could not comprehend at first, one not in the line of the others, but
above. "What is it--that added outline?" he cried.

"What is it! Look again. You'll determine quickly enough! Study it!"
roared out Marston, and Corbett did as he was commanded. Its meaning
flashed upon him.

There, just above the representation of the right-angled triangle, shone
out, clearly and distinctly, this striking figure:

[Illustration: diagram]

What could it mean? Ah, it required no profound mathematician, no
veteran astronomer, to answer such a question! A schoolboy would be
equal to the task. The man of Mars might have no physical resemblance to
the man of Earth, the people of Mars might resemble our elephants or
have wings, but the eternal laws of mathematics and of logic must be the
same throughout all space. Two and two make four, and a straight line is
the shortest distance between two points throughout the universe. And by
adding this figure to