Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/384

 incident occurred. A waggish youth of our company who had joined us from the first on a business holiday, and who had kept us all alive with his fun and frolic, observing Brown at one of the market stalls deep into a bargain about a lump of helium, adroitly undid the waste tube, which was firing out the converted surplus gravity, from its usual and comparatively dignified fastening behind the neck, and brought it down so as to emerge from beneath the old gentleman's coat tails, giving him all the appearance of possessing a fiery appendage in that fundamentary quarter. We all broke at once into a burst of laughter, while the broad grin visible upon some solar faces near us must, as we guessed, be accepted in the same sense, however difficult to be so realized. Brown was excessively angry at first, and more than suspected me, until we had indicated the hopeless delinquent. But his helium bargain, which he presently concluded, soon restored his composure.

Our Lower Solar friends were a fairly busy and progressive people, who occupy all that vast equatorial region of the sun which we have of old assigned to spot liability. It is of course hundreds of thousands of miles in breadth, with a circumference of between two and three millions; and all over this vast area was spread an almost countless multitude of busy humanity. Brown and I secured our seats for Borderland, as the terminal territory is called, and which, in a straight line, was about a quarter of a million of miles from where we had landed. By