vessel, destined to navigate the shoreless Ocean of Space, is
English. But she is also the result of the belief and the faith of an
Englishman in an American ideal.... So when she leaves this earth, as
she will do in an hour or so, to enter the confines of other worlds than
this--and, it may be, to make the acquaintance of peoples other than
those who inhabit the earth--she will have done infinitely more than she
has already done, incredible as that seems. She will not only have
convinced this world that the greatest triumph of human genius is of
Anglo-Saxon origin, but she will carry to other worlds than this the
truth which this world will have learnt before the nineteenth century
ends.

"England in the person of Lord Redgrave, and America in the person of
his Countess, leave this world to-night to tell the other worlds of our
system, if haply they may find some intelligible means of communication,
what this world, good and bad, is like. And it is within the bounds of
possibility that in doing so they may inaugurate a wider fellowship of
created beings than the limits of this world permit; a fellowship, a
friendship, and, as the _Astronef_ entitles us to believe, even a
physical communication of world with world which, in the dawn of the
twentieth century, may transcend in sober fact the wildest dreams of all
the philanthropists and the philosophers who have sought to educate
humanity from Socrates to Herbert Spencer."

CHAPTER VI

After the _Astronef's_ forward searchlight had flashed its farewells to
the thronging, cheering crowds of Washington, her propellers began to
whirl, and she swung round northward on her way to say goodbye to the
Empire City.

A little before midnight her two lights flashed down over New York and
Brooklyn, and were almost instantly answered by hundreds of electric
beams streaming up from different parts of the Twin Cities, and from
several men-of-war lying in the bay and the river.

"Goodbye for the present! Have you any messages for Mars?" flickered out
from above the _Astronef's_ conning-tower.

What Uncle Sam's message was, if he had one, was never deciphered, for
fifty beams began dotting and dashing at once, and the result was that
nothing but a blur of many mingled rays reached the conning-tower from
which Lord Redgrave and his bride were taking their last look at human
habitations.

"You might have known that they would all answer at once," said Zaidie.
"I suppose th