rge tanks, stood the
Wenuses, blowing assiduously through pellucid pipettes and
simultaneously chanting in tones of unearthly gravity a strain
poignantly suggestive of baffled hopes, thwarted aspirations and
impending departure. So absorbed were they in their strange
preparations, that they were entirely unconscious of my presence.
Grotesque and foolish as this may seem to the infatuated reader, it is
absolutely true.

Gradually from out the troubled surface of the tanks there rose a
succession of transparent iridescent globules, steadily waxing in bulk
until they had attained a diameter of about sixteen feet. The Wenuses
then desisted from their labours of inflation, and suddenly plunging
into the tanks, reappeared _inside_ these opalescent globules. I can
only repeat that speculative philosophy, and not sapoleaginous
hydro-dynamics, is my particular forte, and would refer doubtful
readers, in search of further information, to the luminous hypothesis
advanced by Professor Cleaver of Washington to account for the
imbullification of the Wenuses.[1]

Never shall I forget the touching scene that now unfolded itself before
my bewildered eyes. Against a back ground of lemon-coloured sky, with
the stars shedding their spiritual lustre through the purple twilight,
these gorgeous creatures, each ensphered in her beatific bubble, floated
tremulously upward on the balmy breeze. In a moment it all flashed upon
me. They were passing away from the scene of their brief triumph, and I,
a lonely and dejected scientist, saw myself doomed to expiate a moment's
madness in long years of ineffectual speculation on the probable
development of Moral Ideas.

My mind reverted to my abandoned arguments, embodied in the article
which lay beneath the selenite paperweight in my study in Campden Hill
Gardens. Frenzied with despair, I shot out an arm to arrest the upward
transit of the nearest Wenus, when a strange thing occurred.

"At last!" said a voice.

I was startled. It was my wife, accompanied by Mrs. Elphinstone, my
cousin's man, my mother, the widow of the landlord of the "Dog and
Measles," Master Herodotus Tibbles in deep mourning, and the
Artillery-man's brother from Beauchamp's little livery stables.

I shot an appealing glance to the disappearing Wenus. She threw me a
kiss. I threw her another.

My wife took a step forward, and put her hand to my ear. I fell.

[Footnote 1: Cleaver in a subsequent Memoir [Sonnenschein, London, p