erplexed and irritated; those who subsequently
interfered may have been animated also by scientific curiosity. You
would have been well worth anatomisation and chemical analysis. Your
mail-shirt protected you from the shock of the dragon, which was meant
to paralyse and place you at the mercy of your assailants; the metal
distributing the current, and the silken lining resisting its passage.
Still, at the moment when I interposed, you would certainly have been
destroyed but for your manoeuvre of laying hold of two of your
immediate escort. Our destructive weapons are far superior to any you
possess or have described. That levelled at you by my neighbour would
have sent to ten times your distance a small ball, which, bursting,
would have asphyxiated every living thing for several yards around.
But our laws regarding the use of such weapons are very stringent, and
your enemy dared not imperil the lives of those you held. Those laws
would not, he evidently thought, apply to yourself, who, as he would
have affirmed, could not be regarded as a man and an object of legal
protection."

He explained the motives and conduct of his countrymen with such
perfect coolness, such absence of surprise or indignation, that I felt
slightly nettled, and answered sarcastically, "If the slaughter of
strangers whose account of themselves appears improbable be so
completely a matter of course among you, I am at a loss to understand
your own interference, and the treatment I have received from yourself
and your family, so utterly opposite in spirit as well as in form to
that I met from everybody else."

"I do not," he answered, "always act from the motives in vogue among
my fellow-creatures of this planet; but why and how I differ from them
it might not be well to explain. It is for the moment of more
consequence to tell you why you have been kept in some sense a
prisoner here. My neighbours, independently of general laws, are for
certain reasons afraid to do me serious wrong. While in my company or
in my dwelling they could hardly attempt your life without endangering
mine or those of my family. If you were seen alone outside my
premises, another attempt, whether by the asphyxiator or by a
destructive animal, would probably be made, and might this time prove
successful. Till, therefore, the question of your humanity and right
to the protection of our law is decided by those to whom it has been
submitted, I will beg you not to venture alone b