destruction of my wife's host--a figure petrified with alarm and
astonishment. One by one she watched her sisters in arms succumb to the
awful Tea-Tray.

Then it was that this intrepid woman rose to her greatest height.

"Come!" she cried to her Amazons. "Come! They have no more tea left. Now
is the moment ripe."

With these spirited words, my mother and her troops proceeded to charge
down Queen's Road upon the unsuspecting Wenuses.

But they had reckoned without the enemy.

The tumult of the advancing host caught the ear of the Wonderful
Wisitors, and in an instant they had extracted glittering cases of their
crimson cigarettes from their pockets, and lighting them in the strange
fashion I have described elsewhere, they proceeded to puff the smoke
luxuriously into the faces of my mother and her comrades.

Alas! little did these gallant females know of the horrible properties
of the Red Weed. How could they, with our science-teaching in such a
wretched state?

The smoke grew in volume and density, spread and spread, and in a few
minutes the south wing of my wife's army was as supine as the north.

How my wife and mother escaped I shall not say. I make a point of never
explaining the escape of my wife, whether from Martians or Wenuses; but
that night, as Commander-in-Chief, she issued this cataleptic despatch: