gory the critics will consign this weird hypotyposis of the
Supernal) jingling through my tired brain. I set to work at exactly 12.45
A.M. and wrote until our esteemed companions of the nocturnal hours ceased
their unloved music (mosquitos), 5.05 A.M., hied myself back to bed and
hypothecated as many winks as Dame Slumber saw fit to allot to me, who am
at continued war with her silent wand. The same tactics were employed
during the succeeding fifteen nights, wherein I penned eight thousand one
hundred and sixteen (8116) lines. This is the truth, the whole and
integral truth, and nothing but the unexpurgated truth, so help me Muse
(she's blind as a bat) and Satan, of whom I've writ in such an unbecoming
manner that, henceforth, I must perforce seek my future Elysian in other
haunts than those of the above named Cosmopoietic's own, for fear that his
uncoped wrath may blast me into an ape-faced minstrel or, like one
red-haired varlet draped with the cognomen of "Nero," use my unbleached
bones for illuminating the highway to his insidiate lair.

To the readers this question may present itself, to wit: Why place Hell in
the bowels of Betelguese? Why not the sun or moon?

In the first instance the former sphere is eliminated as a possibility on
account of its nature. Being a huge nucleous mass of aeriform fluid,
nothing containing animal or vegetable life could possibly exist either
on or within its bowels. The moon, too, is excluded for the same reason as
is our earth, it having at one time been a part of the latter, broken off
by one of the giant planets long before the pleioncene era. Betelguese
being a celestial pariah, an outcast, the largest of all known comets or
outlawed suns in the universe; and, further, so long as Hell has not been
definitely placed, why not figure this hybrid planet as a possibility?

Astronomers throughout the world remember the colossal outburst in the
constellation Perseus that occurred on February 20, 1901, when one sun
exploded, or two made collision with appalling force. It was observed
through telescopes and could be seen with the naked eye in full daylight.
Both suns were destroyed as suns--that is, they were turned into thin gas
and vanished from sight of the largest telescope within less than a year.

Had each sun been the centre of a system of eight worlds like our sun; and
imagine each world, sixteen in all, to be inhabited with human beings;
then they all perished in a short time aft