let. The famous monument was
a present from the Khedive of Egypt to the United States, and
formerly stood in Alexandria. The late William H. Vanderbilt
defrayed the expense of transporting it to this country.

Bill Hood read this with scant interest. The Giants had knocked the
Braves' pitcher out of the box, and an earthquake seemed a small matter.
His mind did not once revert to the mysterious message from Pax the day
before. He was thinking of something far more important.

"Say, Nellie," he demanded, tossing aside the paper impatiently, "ain't
those waffles ready yet?"

III

On that same evening, Thursday, July 22d, two astronomers attached to
the Naval Observatory sat in the half darkness of the meridian-circle
room watching the firmament sweep slowly across the aperture of the
giant lens. The chamber was as quiet as the grave, the two men rarely
speaking as they noted their observations. Paris might be taken, Berlin
be razed, London put to the torch; a million human beings might be blown
into eternity, or the shrieks of mangled creatures lying in heaps before
pellet-strewn barbed-wire entanglements rend the summer night; great
battleships of the line might plunge to the bottom, carrying their crews
with them; and the dead of two continents rot unburied--yet unmoved the
stars would pursue their nightly march across the heavens, cruel day
would follow pitiless night, and the careless earth follow its
accustomed orbit as though the race were not writhing in its death
agony. Gazing into the infinity of space human existence seemed but the
scum upon a rainpool, human warfare but the frenzy of insectivora.
Unmindful of the starving hordes of Paris and Berlin, of plague-swept
Russia, or of the drowned thousands of the North Baltic Fleet, these two
men calmly studied the procession of the stars--the onward bore of the
universe through space, and the spectra of newborn or dying worlds.

It was a suffocatingly hot night and their foreheads reeked with sweat.
Dim shapes on the walls of the room indicated what by day was a tangle
of clockwork and recording instruments, connected by electricity with
various buttons and switches upon the table. The brother of the big
clock in the wireless operating room hung nearby, its face illuminated
by a tiny electric lamp, showing the hour to be eleven-fifty.
Occasionally the younger man made a remark in a low tone, and the elder
wrote something on a card.

"Th