Turning back alone, through the city, through ways twinkling with myriad lights as little lamps began to blink out amongst garlands and flower-decked booths on every hand, I walked on, lost in varying thoughts, until, fairly tired and hungry, I found myself outside a stall where many Martians stood eating and drinking to their hearts' content. I was known to none of them, and, forgetting past experience, was looking on rather enviously, when there came a touch upon my arm, and— 

 "Are you hungry, sir?" asked a bystander. 

 "Ay," I said, "hungry, good friend, and with all the zest which an empty purse lends to that condition." 

 "Then here is what you need, sir, even from here the wine smells good, and the fried fruit would make a mouse's eye twinkle. Why do you wait?" 

 "Why wait? Why, because though the rich man's dinner goes in at his mouth, the poor man must often be content to dine through his nose. I tell you I have nothing to get me a meal with." 

 The stranger seemed to speculate on this for a time, and then he said, "I cannot fathom your meaning, sir. Buying and selling, gold and money, all these have no meaning to me. Surely the twin blessings of an appetite and food abundant ready and free before you are enough." 

 "What! free is it—free like the breakfast served out this morning?" 

 "Why, of course," said the youth, with mild depreciation; "everything here is free. Everything is his who will take it, without exception. What else is the good of a coherent society and a Government if it cannot provide you with so rudimentary a thing as a meal?" 

 Whereat joyfully I undid my belt, and, without nicely examining the argument, marched into the booth, and there put Martian hospitality to the test, eating and drinking, but this time with growing wisdom, till I was a new man, and then, paying my leaving with a wave of the hand to the yellow-girted one who dispensed the common provender, I sauntered on again, caring little or nothing which way the road went, and soon across the current of my meditations a peal of laughter broke, accompanied by the piping of a flute somewhere close at hand, and the next minute I found myself amid a ring of light-hearted roisterers who were linking hands for a dance to the music a curly-headed fellow was making close by. 

 They made me join them! One rosey-faced damsel at the hither 

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