imilar object.

Occasionally one of the large flying creatures would flutter up to one,
and, folding its wings and coiling a number of its tentacles about the
mast, would regard the crystal fixedly for a space,--sometimes for as
long as fifteen minutes. And a series of observations, made at the
suggestion of Mr. Wace, convinced both watchers that, so far as this
visionary world was concerned, the crystal into which they peered
actually stood at the summit of the endmost mast on the terrace, and
that on one occasion at least one of these inhabitants of this other
world had looked into Mr. Cave's face while he was making these
observations.

So much for the essential facts of this very singular story. Unless we
dismiss it all as the ingenious fabrication of Mr. Wace, we have to
believe one of two things: either that Mr. Cave's crystal was in two
worlds at once, and that, while it was carried about in one, it remained
stationary in the other, which seems altogether absurd; or else that it
had some peculiar relation of sympathy with another and exactly similar
crystal in this other world, so that what was seen in the interior of
the one in this world was, under suitable conditions, visible to an
observer in the corresponding crystal in the other world; and _vice
versa_. At present, indeed, we do not know of any way in which two
crystals could so come _en rapport_, but nowadays we know enough to
understand that the thing is not altogether impossible. This view of the
crystals as _en rapport_ was the supposition that occurred to Mr. Wace,
and to me at least it seems extremely plausible....

And where was this other world? On this, also, the alert intelligence of
Mr. Wace speedily threw light. After sunset, the sky darkened
rapidly--there was a very brief twilight interval indeed--and the stars
shone out. They were recognisably the same as those we see, arranged in
the same constellations. Mr. Cave recognised the Bear, the Pleiades,
Aldebaran, and Sirius: so that the other world must be somewhere in the
solar system, and, at the utmost, only a few hundreds of millions of
miles from our own. Following up this clue, Mr. Wace learned that the
midnight sky was a darker blue even than our midwinter sky, and that the
sun seemed a little smaller. _And there were two small moons!_ "like our
moon but smaller, and quite differently marked" one of which moved so
rapidly that its motion was clearly visible as one regarded it. These
moo