DAYS, weeks, months, seasons, years, pass quickly on this planet,—and doubtless also on the others. The Earth has already run its yearly course around the Sun twenty times since destiny so tragically closed the book that my young friends had been reading for less than a year. Their happiness was short-lived; their morning faded away like the dawn.
I had forgotten,[1] or at least lost sight of them, when quite recently, at a hypnotic séance in Nancy, where I had stopped for a few days on my way to the Vosges, I was induced to question a "subject" by whose assistance the experimental savants of the Académie Stanislas had obtained some of those really startling results with which the scientific Press has surprised us for a few years past. I do not remember how, but it happened that my conversation with him turned on the planet Mars. After describing to me a country situated on the shores of a sea known to astronomers under the name of Kepler's Ocean, and a solitary island lying in the bosom of this sea; after telling me about the picturesque landscapes and reddish vegetation which adorned the shores, the wave-washed cliffs, and the sandy beaches where the billows break and die away,—the subject, who was very sensitive, suddenly grew pale, and raised his hand to his head; his eyes closed, his eyebrows contracted; he seemed desirous of grasping some fugitive idea which obstinately eluded him. "See!" said Dr. B., standing before him with irresistible command; "see! I wish it."
"You have friends there," he said to me.
"I am not surprised at that," I said, laughing; "I have done enough to deserve them."
"Two friends," he went on, "who are talking about you now, this very minute."
"Ah, ha! Persons who know me?"
"Yes."
"How is that?"
"They have known you here."
"Here?"