the
enquiries of Mr. Wace to have reached him through the dealers. He has
been able to discover Mr. Cave's clergyman and "Oriental"--no other than
the Rev. James Parker and the young Prince of Bosso-Kuni in Java. I am
obliged to them for certain particulars. The object of the Prince was
simply curiosity--and extravagance. He was so eager to buy, because Cave
was so oddly reluctant to sell. It is just as possible that the buyer in
the second instance was simply a casual purchaser and not a collector at
all, and the crystal egg, for all I know, may at the present moment be
within a mile of me, decorating a drawing-room or serving as a
paper-weight--its remarkable functions all unknown. Indeed, it is partly
with the idea of such a possibility that I have thrown this narrative
into a form that will give it a chance of being read by the ordinary
consumer of fiction.

My own ideas in the matter are practically identical with those of Mr.
Wace. I believe the crystal on the mast in Mars and the crystal egg of
Mr. Cave's to be in some physical, but at present quite inexplicable,
way _en rapport_, and we both believe further that the terrestrial
crystal must have been--possibly at some remote date--sent hither from
that planet, in order to give the Martians a near view of our affairs.
Possibly the fellows to the crystals in the other masts are also on our
globe. No theory of hallucination suffices for the facts.

The Star

THE STAR

It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made,
almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the
planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the
sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a
suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news
was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose
inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor
outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a
faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause
any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the
intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new
body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite
different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the
deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an
unprecedented kind.