the doings of another, and they almost always locate them simply IN
OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, and think that is enough without going into
little details such as naming the particular world they are from.
It is like a learned Hindoo showing off how much he knows by saying
Longfellow lives in the United States--as if he lived all over the
United States, and as if the country was so small you couldn't
throw a brick there without hitting him. Between you and me, it
does gravel me, the cool way people from those monster worlds
outside our system snub our little world, and even our system. Of
course we think a good deal of Jupiter, because our world is only a
potato to it, for size; but then there are worlds in other systems
that Jupiter isn't even a mustard-seed to--like the planet Goobra,
for instance, which you couldn't squeeze inside the orbit of
Halley's comet without straining the rivets. Tourists from Goobra
(I mean parties that lived and died there--natives) come here, now
and then, and inquire about our world, and when they find out it is
so little that a streak of lightning can flash clear around it in
the eighth of a second, they have to lean up against something to
laugh. Then they screw a glass into their eye and go to examining
us, as if we were a curious kind of foreign bug, or something of
that sort. One of them asked me how long our day was; and when I
told him it was twelve hours long, as a general thing, he asked me
if people where I was from considered it worth while to get up and
wash for such a day as that. That is the way with those Goobra
people--they can't seem to let a chance go by to throw it in your
face that their day is three hundred and twenty-two of our years
long. This young snob was just of age--he was six or seven
thousand of his days old--say two million of our years--and he had
all the puppy airs that belong to that time of life--that turning-
point when a person has got over being a boy and yet ain't quite a