with extreme slowness at work again upon all its treasures. Here and
there I found traces of the little people in the shape of rare
fossils broken to pieces or threaded in strings upon reeds. And the
cases had in some instances been bodily removed--by the Morlocks as
I judged. The place was very silent. The thick dust deadened our
footsteps. Weena, who had been rolling a sea urchin down the sloping
glass of a case, presently came, as I stared about me, and very
quietly took my hand and stood beside me.

'And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an
intellectual age, that I gave no thought to the possibilities it
presented. Even my preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a
little from my mind.

'To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain
had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palaeontology;
possibly historical galleries; it might be, even a library! To me,
at least in my present circumstances, these would be vastly more
interesting than this spectacle of oldtime geology in decay.
Exploring, I found another short gallery running transversely to the
first. This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the sight of a
block of sulphur set my mind running on gunpowder. But I could find
no saltpeter; indeed, no nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had
deliquesced ages ago. Yet the sulphur hung in my mind, and set up a
train of thinking. As for the rest of the contents of that gallery,
though on the whole they were the best preserved of all I saw, I had
little interest. I am no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on
down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had
entered. Apparently this section had been devoted to natural
history, but everything had long since passed out of recognition. A