ascending high up in the thin hydrogen atmosphere, travelling here was at much greater speed than we were used to in our own heavier atmospheric medium. Although we were a good twenty-four of our hours on this voyage, we were never tired of the vast and varied landscape beneath, and we had besides a comfortable sleep by the way.
The grandest spectacle of all is the approach to Upper Solardom, which was heralded to us from afar by the gradual diminution of electrical disturbance overhead, and the bright and steady serenity of the remote horizon. This Borderland has, from one cause and another, come to be thickly occupied by the Lower Solars. One cause of attraction is the accommodation required for the curious who travel into Upper Solardom; and who are apt to linger, both going and returning, in the comparatively bright scenes of all the circuit of this Border territory. But as neither Upper Solars, nor their Upper Solardom, have much attraction for the Lower—there being, as we shall presently show, no great love lost between them, and no great coveting on the one part for the other's condition—the crowd and business of Borderland was due chiefly to quite another cause.
All this Borderland, then, was a sort of sanitarium, physical and mental, for the Lower Solars; and a delightful, as well as healthful, change it ever proved. The consequence was that great numbers had, for many generations back, made this attractive territory their permanent home. There was a curious consequence to those whose families had thus lived longest on the border, and especially along its nearest Upper Solar edges, namely that they began to
