redeemed or paid off.  The “square measure,” upon which the coinage, if I may so call it is based, following exactly the measure of length, each larger area in the ascending scale represents 144 times that below it.  Thus the styly being a little more than a foot, the steely is about 13 feet, or one-twelfth of the staly; but the steelta (or square steely) is 1/144th part of the stalta.  The stolta, again, is about 600 yards square, or 360,000 square yards, 144 times the stalta.  The highest note, so to speak, in circulation represents this last area; but all calculations are made in staltau, or twelfths thereof.  The stalta will purchase about six ounces of gold.  Notes are issued for the third, fourth, and twelfth parts of this:  values smaller than the latter are represented by a token coinage of square medals composed of an alloy in which gold and silver respectively are the principal elements.  The lowest coin is worth about threepence of English money.

Stopping at the largest public building in the city, a central hexagon with a number of smaller hexagons rising around it, we entered one of the latter, each side of which might be some 30 feet in length and 15 in height.  Here were ranged a large number of instruments on the principle of the voice-writer, but conveying the sound to a vast distance along electric wires into one which reverses the voice-recording process, and repeats the vocal sound itself.  Through one of these, after exchanging a few words with one of the officials in charge of them, Esmo carried on a conversation of some length, the instrument being so arranged that while the mouth is applied to one tube another may be held to the ear to receive the reply.  In the meantime I fell in with one of the officers, apparently very young, who was strongly interested at the sight of the much-canvassed stranger, and, perhaps on this account, far more obliging than is common among his countrymen.  From him I learnt that this, with another method I will presently describe, is the sole means of distant communication employed in Mars.  Those who have not leisure or do not care to visit one of the offices, never more than twelve-miles distant from one another, in which the public instruments are kept, can have a wire conveyed to their own house.  Almost every house of any pretension possesses such a wire.  Leading me into the next apartment, my friend pointed out an immense number of instruments of a box-like shape, with a slit in which a leaf of about four inches by two was placed.  These were constantly ejected and on the instant mechanically replaced.  The fallen leaves were collected and sorted by the officers present, and at once placed in one or other of another set of exactly similar instruments.  Any one possessing a private wire can write at his own desk in the manual character a letter or message on one of these slips.  Placing it in his own instrument, it at once reproduces itself