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An al aversion, more of the spirit than of the flesh, instantly seized the ht of even the few h he had been expecting to see sorotesque and horrible, his mind holly unprepared for the real hideousness of these creatures, now seen by the ever-strengthening light of day

And slowly, as he stared, the knowledge dawned on hireater and ent than he had foreseen; here were factors not yet understood; here, the product of forces till then not even dreamed of by his scientific mind

"I--I certainly did expect to find a sht he "Small, and possibly misshapen, the descendants, maybe, of a few survivors of the cataclyshastly spectacle, he laid his eye to the chink in the wall, and looked

A tenuous fog still drifted slowly a the deeper recesses Yet, near at hand, within the liineer co could be s (for so he , lying orhad now almost died down It was evident that the revel had ceased, and that the Horde was settling down to rest--glutted, no doubt, with the raw and bleeding flesh of the conquered foe

Stern could easily have poked his pistol h the crack in the wall and shot downupon hiet rid of at least a dozen or a score; but prudence restrained his hand

"No use!" he told hietto observe the eye of science, he studied the shifting, confused picture out there before him

Then he realized that the feature which, above all else, struck his

"Not black, not even brown," said he "I thought so, last night, but daylight corrects the impression Not red, either, or copper-colored What color, then? For Heaven's sake, what?"

He could hardly naray, almost a blue He recalled that once he had seen a child's -clay, much-used and very dirty, of the sanation in the chrohter--these, no doubt, the younger ones--but they all partook of this same characteristic tint And the skin, moreover, looked dull and sickly, rather