he same table. The invention of the
confectioners is exquisite and inexhaustible; and every table is
supplied with a variety of dainties sufficient for a feast in the most
hospitable and wealthy household of Europe. Many of the smaller
fruit-trees and shrubs yield two crops in the year. The vegetables,
crisper, and of much more varied taste than the best Terrestrial
salads, sometimes possessing a flavour as _piquant_ as that of
cinnamon or nutmeg, are gathered continuously from one end of the year
to the other.

The vines, tough and fibrous, supply the best and strongest cordage
used in Mars. For this purpose they are dried, stripped, combed, and
put through an elaborate process of manufacture, which, without
weakening the fibres, renders them smooth, and removes the, knots in
which they naturally abound. The twisted cord of the nut-vine is
almost as strong as a metallic wire rope of half its measurement.
There is another purpose for which these fibres in their natural state
are employed. Simply dried and twisted, they form a scourge as
terrible as the Russian knout or African cowhide, though of a
different character--a scourge which, even in its lightest form,
reduces the wildest herd to instant order; and which, as employed on
criminals, is hardly less dreaded than that electric rack whereby
Martial science inflicts on every nerve a graduated torture such as
even ecclesiastical malignity has not invented on Earth--such as I
certainly will not place in the hands of Terrestrial rulers.

All these crops are raised with marvellously little human labour, the
whole work of ploughing and sowing being done by machinery, that of
weeding and harvesting chiefly by the carvee. The ambau climb the
trees and pick the fruit from the ends of the branches, which they are
also taught to pinch in, so that none grow so long as to break with
the weight of these creatures, as clever and agile as the smaller
monkeys, but almost as large as an ordinary baboon. It must always be
remembered that, size for size, and _caeteris paribus,_ all bodies,
animate and inanimate, on Mars weigh less than half as much as they
would on Earth. Eunane's blunder about the _carcara_ was not explained
by any subsequent errors of the ambau or carvee, which always selected
the ripe fruit with faultless skill, leaving the immature untouched,
and throwing aside in small heaps to manure the ground the few that
had been allowed to grow too ripe for use. The sums pai