slowly floating away a wonderfully fair country lay at my feet, with
a broad sea glimmering in many arms and bays in the distance beyond.
It was all dim and unreal at first, the mountains shadowy, the ocean
unreal, the flowery fields between it and me vacant and shadowy.

Yet were they vacant? As my eyes cleared and day brightened still more,
and I turned my head this way and that, it presently dawned upon me
all the meadow coppices and terraces northwards of where I lay, all
that blue and spacious ground I had thought to be bare and vacant, were
alive with a teeming city of booths and tents; now I came to look more
closely there was a whole town upon the slope, built as might be in a
night of boughs and branches still unwithered, the streets and ways of
that city in the shadows thronged with expectant people moving in groups
and shifting to and fro in lively streams--chatting at the stalls and
clustering round the tent doors in soft, gauzy, parti-coloured crowds
in a way both fascinating and perplexing.

I stared about me like a child at its first pantomime, dimly understanding
all I saw was novel, but more allured to the colour and life of the
picture than concerned with its exact meaning; and while I stared
and turned my finger was bandaged, and my new friend had been lisping
away to me without getting anything in turn but a shake of the head.
This made him thoughtful, and thereon followed a curious incident which
I cannot explain. I doubt even whether you will believe it; but what
am I to do in that case? You have already accepted the episode of my
coming, or you would have shut the covers before arriving at this page
of my modest narrative, and this emboldens me. I may strengthen my
claim on your credulity by pointing out the extraordinary marvels which
science is teaching you even on our own little world. To quote a single
instance: If any one had declared ten years ago that it would shortly