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156
THE GERM GROWERS.

baulked, and that I had been no nearer to his world than I was now.

I cried out, "You have shown me the moon, perhaps in trance, perhaps you have transferred me there. But what of that? You've shown me nothing of the dwellers in space."

"Be quiet," he said, lifting his hand, and again using the same tone, masterful and yet persuasive, "you have done very well for once;" and then he added in a lower and quite different tone, "and so have I."

I never could make you understand the mixture of contending feelings which began to harass me now. No one, I think, could understand it without undergoing it. I was astonished at what had happened to myself, and yet I was grievously disappointed.

Even if I had been sure that I had been actually transferred to the surface of the moon, that would have seemed as nothing to me now. For what I had looked for was a far greater thing. I had long learned to regard the ether which pervades the interplanatory spaces as the hidden storehouse of material out of which the visible worlds are made, and yet the ether is utterly impalpable to any of the senses, and we know of its existence only by roundabout processes of reasoning,