Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/365

 to pay. There is no help in passenger traffic, for instance, from even the Second Jovian. Indeed, the flint-chipping savages there are rather an obstacle; and more especially in the colder latitudes of that moon they are at times truculent and dangerous to such a degree as the plodding First Jovians have no fancy to encounter, in their purely business expeditions. We ourselves, also, were in something of the same mind just at this particular time, so that we did not visit any of these outhers, having other and better game in view. Still less had we an idea of pushing on as far as Saturn, even had he lain nearer to us then in his orbit. The range of profitable trading narrows much with this costly distance, while the intense cold involves additional expense; and withal only the first Saturnian moon has reached a human population, and that as yet hardly out of the paleolithics in flints and other barbarism. The grand spectacle of the Saturnian Rings, and all that sort of thing, although well enough for poetry, does not now enter into business purview. We therefore turned our steps homewards, taking, however, the packet to Vesta, with intention to call, besides, at one or two other and lesser planetoids which might happen at the time to lie most conveniently in our way.

This great celestial archipelago, of almost countless worlds, from a few hundred miles' diameter, to a few inches or even still less, used to present a very dangerous navigation for some years at first. Several of the earlier expeditions into it were never more heard of. One in particular was actually seen, from our observatory in Ceres, to be dashed into by a passing world, no bigger than a haystack of our old times, and