e looking for a chair perhaps," said my host presently. "We have
none. To stand erect on the feet is a precarious position, and to sit is
hardly less precarious. We avoid all risk. On all fours or in a
recumbent position one is safe. However, if you would like to sit on the
floor, pray do so, while I make up the prescription which you require."

I sat down on the floor, which was very hard and discouraging. I did not
greatly like that use of the word "prescription," and my inner man cried
rather for butcher's meat than for chemist's stuff. However, a man must
take his adventures as he finds them.

My guide slipped his hands out of his boots and consulted the volume on
the table. "From long use," he said meditatively, "I know most of the
numbers by heart; but I cannot recall what is taken for a chill caused
by prolonged submersion in sea-water. I have never had occasion to use
it. Ah, here we are! Number one hundred and one."

He took down the bottle which bore that number, and dropped one pill
from it into an aluminium cup. I noticed that the shelves were all
placed low on the wall. But indeed the whole of the appointments and
furniture of the house was adapted for beings who used the quadrupedal
position. I noticed, moreover, both now and afterwards, what very little
furniture there was in these houses. The hatred of superfluity was a
marked characteristic of the people of Thule.

My host took down one bottle after another from the shelves, talking as
he did so. Each bottle had an ingenious stopper, which allowed one pill,
and only one, to fall out each time that the bottle was reversed.

"I have never eaten shark, cooked or uncooked," said my host, "but I
should imagine that a diet confined to this meat would give an excess of
nitrogen. We correct that with one of number eighteen. To this I add our
ordinary repast--numbers one, two, and three--a corrective for
exhaustion from number sixty-four, and a pill of a narcotic character
from sixty-eight."

He handed me the little aluminium cup with the pills in it. "I think,"
he said, "that is all you require."

"I am extremely thirsty," I said.

"No civilised man eats and drinks at the same time." He whisked down
another bottle and dropped one more pill into my cup. "You will find,"
he said, "that little addition will remove all sensation of thirst. You
shall drink when the right time comes."

I took my pills obediently and was now conducted by him into a much
smal