small white benches.

The roof, which was guarded with a breast-high parapet around both its
inner and outer edges, was beautifully laid out with a variety of
flowers and with trellised flower-bearing vines. In one corner were
growing a number of small trees with great fan-shaped leaves of blue and
bearing a large bell-shaped silver blossom.

One end of the roof on the lake side was partially enclosed. Towards
this roofed enclosure the Chemist led his friends. Within it a large
fiber hammock hung between two stone posts. At one side a depression in
the floor perhaps eight feet square was filled with what might have been
blue pine needles, and a fluffy bluish moss. This rustic couch was
covered at one end by a canopy of vines bearing a little white flower.

As they entered the enclosure, it began to rain, and the Chemist slid
forward several panels, closing them in completely. There were shuttered
windows in these walls, through which they could look at the scene
outside--a scene that with the coming storm was weird and beautiful
beyond anything they had ever beheld.

The cloud had spread sufficiently now to blot out the stars from nearly
half of the sky. It was a thick cloud, absolutely opaque, and yet it
caused no appreciable darkness, for the starlight it cut off was
negligible and the silver radiation from the lake had more than doubled
in intensity.

Under the strong wind that had sprung up the lake assumed now an
extraordinary aspect. Its surface was raised into long, sweeping waves
that curved sharply and broke upon themselves. In their tops the silver
phosphorescence glowed and whirled until the whole surface of the lake
seemed filled with a dancing white fire, twisting, turning and seeming
to leap out of the water high into the air.

Several small sailboats, square, flat little catamarans, they looked,
showed black against the water as they scudded for shore, trailing lines
of silver out behind them.

The wind increased in force. Below, on the beach, a huge rock lay in the
water, against which the surf was breaking. Columns of water at times
shot into the air before the face of the rock, and were blown away by
the wind in great clouds of glistening silver. Occasionally it thundered
with a very sharp intense crack accompanied by a jagged bolt of bluish
lightning that zigzagged down from the low-hanging cloud.

Then came the rain in earnest, a solid, heavy torrent, that bent down
the wind and smoothed th