Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/353

 heard, just before leaving, that the influential Semit Eht was to thunder against us, in its first leader, next morning, by way of rebuke and protest, for our earth's intermeddling with Marsian affairs. As a copy of the paper, with the article in question, reached us at Io by the succeeding mail, I may as well give here some idea of its attack. The Marsian newspapers, I may here also remark, are the oddest and clumsiest things imaginable, being all printed separately from types, and upon such huge expanses of heavy paper, that a mere few hundreds of them would make a fair load for even a strong back. Their circulation is rarely much above a hundred thousand respectively, and over this petty handful of copies they will be pulling away for whole hours of a morning, with a huge and cumbrous iron printing machine. What a contrast, in this respect, between the processes of the two planets! And what, for instance, would these Marsian slow-coaches say to our most recent diaphanous-reflector process, which flashes off a million copies per second!

Well, the article in question begins, somewhat warily, in high compliment to our earth, "that much vaster and brighter world, from whose advanced science Marsians had admittedly so much to learn, and whose illustrious citizens had honoured them by frequent personal intercourse." Then followed a delicate laudation of the reader's humble servant, as "one who was by no means the least of the rival multitudes of the great of his own great world—a conspicuous personage alike publicly and privately, as conducting, with eminently successful ability, an extensive business of his own, of far ancestral inherit-