nly into
the westward sky!

Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening
star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere
twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour
after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared
and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are
foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky
Hottentots, Gold Coast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood
in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new
star.

And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,
rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed
together, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus
and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel
astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a
sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had
so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck,
fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat
of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one
vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before
the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank
westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it,
but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those
sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard
nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb
zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the
night.

And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on
hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the
rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it,
like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into
existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger,"
they cried. "It is brighter!" And, indeed the moon a quarter full and
sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but
scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little
circle of the strange new star.

"It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the
dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered