little people, and with the big open portals that yawned before me

shadowy and mysterious. My general impression of the world I saw

over their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and

flowers, a long neglected and yet weedless garden. I saw a number

of tall spikes of strange white flowers, measuring a foot perhaps

across the spread of the waxen petals. They grew scattered, as if

wild, among the variegated shrubs, but, as I say, I did not examine

them closely at this time. The Time Machine was left deserted on the

turf among the rhododendrons.

'The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did

not observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw

suggestions of old Phoenician decorations as I passed through, and

it struck me that they were very badly broken and weather-worn.

Several more brightly clad people met me in the doorway, and so we

entered, I, dressed in dingy nineteenth-century garments, looking

grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers, and surrounded by an

eddying mass of bright, soft-colored robes and shining white limbs,

in a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing speech.

The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung with

brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed

with coloured glass and partially unglazed, admitted a tempered

light. The floor was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white

metal, not plates nor slabs--blocks, and it was so much worn, as I

judged by the going to and fro of past generations, as to be deeply