e now found rest and health in the reading, the music, the gentle
family communion which comes from a simpler and saner division of their
time. With greater health and greater pleasure they are richer than
before, even after they have paid those increased contributions to the
common fund which have so raised the standard of life in these islands.

There is some clash of opinion as to the exact hour of the great
awakening. It is generally agreed that, apart from the difference of
clocks, there may have been local causes which influenced the action of
the poison. Certainly, in each separate district the resurrection was
practically simultaneous. There are numerous witnesses that Big Ben
pointed to ten minutes past six at the moment. The Astronomer Royal has
fixed the Greenwich time at twelve past six. On the other hand, Laird
Johnson, a very capable East Anglia observer, has recorded six-twenty as
the hour. In the Hebrides it was as late as seven. In our own case
there can be no doubt whatever, for I was seated in Challenger's study
with his carefully tested chronometer in front of me at the moment. The
hour was a quarter-past six.

An enormous depression was weighing upon my spirits. The cumulative
effect of all the dreadful sights which we had seen upon our journey was
heavy upon my soul. With my abounding animal health and great physical
energy any kind of mental clouding was a rare event. I had the Irish
faculty of seeing some gleam of humor in every darkness. But now the
obscurity was appalling and unrelieved. The others were downstairs
making their plans for the future. I sat by the open window, my chin
resting upon my hand and my mind absorbed in the misery of our situation.
Could we continue to live? That was the question which I had begun to
ask myself. Was it possible to exist upon a dead world? Just as in
physics the greater body draws to itself the lesser, would we not feel an
overpowering attraction from that vast body of humanity which had passed
into the unknown? How would the end come? Would it be from a return of
the poison? Or would the earth be uninhabitable from the mephitic
products of universal decay? Or, finally, might our awful situation prey
upon and unbalance our minds? A group of insane folk upon a dead world!
My mind was brooding upon this last dreadful idea when some slight noise
caused me to look down upon the road beneath me. The old cab horse was
coming up the hill