be in that out-fashioned region you have come from I cannot tell, but here—'tis so commonplace I should have thought you must have known it—we put each new year the names of all womenkind into an urn and the men draw for them, each town, each village by itself, and those they draw are theirs; is it conceivable your race has other methods?" 

 I told her it was so—we picked and chose for ourselves, beseeching the damsels, fighting for them, and holding the sun of romance was at its setting just where the Martians held it to rise. Whereat An burst out laughing—a clear, ringing laugh that set all the light-hearted folk in the nearest boats laughing in sympathy. But when the grotesqueness of the idea had somewhat worn off, she turned grave and asked me if such a fancy did not lead to spite, envy, and bickerings.  "Why, it seems to me," she said, shaking her curly head, "such a plan might fire cities, desolate plains, and empty palaces—" 

 "Such things have been." 

 "Ah! our way is much the better. See!" quoth that gentle philosopher. "'Here,' one of our women would say, 'am I to-day, unwed, as free of thought as yonder bird chasing the catkin down; tomorrow I shall be married, with a whole summer to make love in, relieved at one bound of all those uncertainties you acknowledge to, with nothing to do but lie about on sunny banks with him whom chance sends me, come to the goal of love without any travelling to get there.'  Why, you must acknowledge this is the perfection of ease." 

 "But supposing," I said, "chance dealt unkindly to you from your nuptial urn, supposing the man was not to your liking, or another coveted him?" To which An answered, with some shrewdness— 

 "In the first case we should do what we might, being no worse off than those in your land who had played ill providence to themselves. In the second, no maid would covet him whom fate had given to another, it were too fatiguing, or if such a thing DID happen, then one of them would waive his claims, for no man or woman ever born was worth a wrangle, and it is allowed us to barter and change a little." 

 All this was strange enough. I could not but laugh, while An laughed at the lightest invitation, and thus chatting and deriding each other's social arrangements we floated idly townwards and presently came out into the main waterway perhaps a mile wide and flowing rapidly, as streams will on the threshold of the spring, with brash or waste of distant beaches riding down it, and every now and then a broken 

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