d and everyone else alive."

Challenger's great eyebrows were drawn down in concentrated thought,
while his huge, hairy paw closed upon the outstretched hand of his wife.
I had observed that she always held out her arms to him in trouble as a
child would to its mother.

"Without being a fatalist to the point of nonresistance," said he, "I
have always found that the highest wisdom lies in an acquiescence with
the actual." He spoke slowly, and there was a vibration of feeling in
his sonorous voice.

"I do _not_ acquiesce," said Summerlee firmly.

"I don't see that it matters a row of pins whether you acquiesce or
whether you don't," remarked Lord John. "You've got to take it, whether
you take it fightin' or take it lyin' down, so what's the odds whether
you acquiesce or not?

"I can't remember that anyone asked our permission before the thing
began, and nobody's likely to ask it now. So what difference can it make
what we may think of it?"

"It is just all the difference between happiness and misery," said
Challenger with an abstracted face, still patting his wife's hand. "You
can swim with the tide and have peace in mind and soul, or you can thrust
against it and be bruised and weary. This business is beyond us, so let
us accept it as it stands and say no more."

"But what in the world are we to do with our lives?" I asked, appealing
in desperation to the blue, empty heaven.

"What am I to do, for example? There are no newspapers, so there's an
end of my vocation."

"And there's nothin' left to shoot, and no more soldierin', so there's an
end of mine," said Lord John.

"And there are no students, so there's an end of mine," cried Summerlee.

"But I have my husband and my house, so I can thank heaven that there is
no end of mine," said the lady.

"Nor is there an end of mine," remarked Challenger, "for science is not
dead, and this catastrophe in itself will offer us many most absorbing
problems for investigation."

He had now flung open the windows and we were gazing out upon the silent
and motionless landscape.

"Let me consider," he continued. "It was about three, or a little after,
yesterday afternoon that the world finally entered the poison belt to the
extent of being completely submerged. It is now nine o'clock. The
question is, at what hour did we pass out from it?"

"The air was very bad at daybreak," said I.

"Later than that," said Mrs. Challenger. "As late as eight o'clock I
dist