is is only one of
the smallest of our fleet.'

"Then I noticed that the automobile had no front, and there were two
cannons mounted where the front should be. I noticed, too, that we
were traveling very low, almost down on the ground. Presently we
got to the bottom of a hill and started up another, and I found
myself walking ahead of the 'mobile. I turned around to look for
the little girl, and instead of her I found a kitten capering beside
me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over
a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of
vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, 'This view beggars all
admiration.' Then all at once we were in a great group of people
and I undertook to repeat to them the kitten's remark, but when I
tried to do it the words were so touching that I broke down and
cried, and all the group cried, too, over the kitten's moving
remark."

The joy with which he told this absurd sleep fancy made it supremely
ridiculous and we laughed until tears really came.

One morning he said: "I was awake a good deal in the night, and I tried
to think of interesting things. I got to working out geological periods,
trying to think of some way to comprehend them, and then astronomical
periods. Of course it's impossible, but I thought of a plan that seemed
to mean something to me. I remembered that Neptune is two billion eight
hundred million miles away. That, of course, is incomprehensible, but
then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion
miles--twenty-five trillion--or nearly a thousand times as far, and then
I took this book and counted the lines on a page and I found that there
was an average of thirty-two lines to the page and two hundred and forty
pages, and I figured out that, counting the distance to Neptune as
one line, there were still not enough lines in the book by nearly two
thousand to reach the nearest fixed star, and somehow that gave me a
sort of dim idea of the vastness of the distance and kind of a journey
into space."

Later I figured out another method of comprehending a little of that
great distance by estimating the existence of the human race at thirty
thousand years (Lord Kelvin's figures) and the average generation to
have been thirty-three years with a world population of 1,500,000,000
souls. I assumed the nearest fixed star to be the first station in
Parad