e not we shall have to
teach you manners."

"But you're not going to fight them all, dear, are you? Don't let us be
the first to bring war and bloodshed with us into another world."

"Don't trouble about that, little woman, it's here already," he replied,
a trifle savagely. "People don't have air-ships and guns which fire
shells or poison-bombs, or whatever they were, without knowing what war
is. From what I've seen, I should say these Martians have civilised
themselves out of all emotions, and, I daresay, have fought pitilessly
for the possession of the last habitable lands of the planet.

"They've preyed upon each other till only the fittest are left, and
those, I suppose, were the ones who invented the air-ships and finally
got possession of all that was worth having. Of course that would give
them the command of the planet, land and sea. In fact, if we are able to
make the personal acquaintance of the Martians, we shall probably find
them a set of over-civilised savages."

"That's a rather striking paradox, isn't it, dear?" said Zaidie,
slipping her hand through his arm; "but still it's not at all bad. You
mean, of course, that they may have civilised themselves out of all the
emotions until they're just a set of cold, calculating, scientific
animals. After all they must be something of the sort, for I'm quite
sure we should not have done anything like that on earth if we'd had a
visitor from Mars. We shouldn't have got out cannons and shot at him
before we'd even made his acquaintance.

"Now, if he, or they, had dropped in America as we were going down
there, we should have received them with deputations, given them
banquets, which they might not have been able to eat, and speeches,
which they would not understand, and photographed them, and filled the
newspapers with everything that we could imagine about them, and then
put them in a palace car and hustled them round the country for
everybody to look at."

"And meanwhile," laughed Redgrave, "some of your smart engineers, I
suppose, would have gone over the vessel they had come in, found out how
she was worked, and taken out a dozen patents for her machinery."

"Very likely," replied Zaidie, with a saucy little toss of her chin;
"and why not? We like to learn things down there--and anyhow that would
be much more really civilised than shooting at them."

While this little conversation was going on, the _Astronef_ was dropping
rapidly into the midst of the M