Far off on all hands other dead embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far that the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance.

Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with mankind on its bullet.

Even to us who have known no other, it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.
But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself.

He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and renewing.

Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and the freshness of his countenance.