Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/345

 The Old Party feel, in fact, that they are thus losing one of the main props of their fundamental political sentiment—the supremacy of Accident over Principle.

Naturally enough, some little time elapsed ere our excursion enterprise extended beyond Venus on the one hand, and Mars on the other. Not only was the greatly increased distance a heavy expense in both time and money, especially to our earlier inexperience, but the excessive heat in the one direction, and the excessive cold in the other, involved, to our particular frames and feelings, much further costs, as well as our being habilitated in most cumbrous apparatus, with the adaptation and management of which we were not at first by any means so familiar as we are to-day. After a further interval, however, our adventurers of the earth did set foot upon Mercury; and this successful effort was followed by our reaching, in spite of navigation dangers, one of the larger of the countless planetoids circulating between Mars and Jupiter; to be happily followed, after a further time, by our advance outwards, through all that rather intricate planetoidal archipelago, as far as the magnificent system of Jupiter. There we soon picked up acquaintance with the first satellite, lo, rather larger than our moon, with whose fairly intelligent people we have since carried on a regular and profitable trading, only second in importance to that carried on with Mars and Venus. Some interesting features of "the first Jovian," as we call this his nearest moon, I shall have presently another opportunity to narrate.