ke every opportunity of assisting every other by every method within
his power. We employ them, we promote them, we give them the
preference in every kind of patronage at our command. But these
obligations are points of honour rather than of law. Only apostasy or
treason to the Order involve compulsory penalties; and the latter, if
it ever occurred in these days, would be visited with instant
death,--inflicted, as it is inflicted upon irreconcilable enemies, in
such a manner that none could know who passed the sentence, or by whom
it was executed."

"And have you," I asked, "no apostates, as you have no traitors?"

"No," he said. "In the first place, none who has lived among us could
endure to fall into the ordinary Martial life. Secondly, the
foundations of our simple creed are so clear, so capable of being made
apparent to every one, that none once familiar with the evidences can
well cease to believe them."

Here he paused, and I asked, "How is it possible that the means you
employ to punish those who have wronged you should not, in some cases
at least, indicate the person who has employed them?"

"Because," he said, "the means of vengeance are not corporeal; the
agency does not in the least resemble any with which our countrymen,
or apparently your race on Earth, are acquainted. A traitor would be
found dead with no sign of suffering or injury, and the physician
would pronounce that he had died of apoplexy or heart disease. A
persecutor, or one who had unpardonably wronged any of the Children of
the Star, might go mad, might fling himself from a precipice, might be
visited with the most terrible series of calamities, all natural in
their character, all distinctly traceable to natural causes, but
astonishing and even apparently supernatural in their accumulation,
and often in their immediate appropriateness to the character of his
offence. Our neighbours would, of course, destroy the avenger, if they
could find him out--would attempt to exterminate our society, could
they prove its agency."

"But surely your countrymen must either disbelieve in such agency, in
which case they can hardly fear your vengeance, or they must believe
it, and then would deem it just and necessary to retaliate."

"No," he said. "They disbelieve in the possibility while they are
forced to see the fact. It is impossible, they would say, that a man
should be injured in mind or body, reputation or estate, that the
forces of Nature or the