and predict there'll be a special kind of a pebble on the
beach, I don't see how you can disgrace yourself, if some other pebble
will do just as well--because the feeble thing said to have been seen in
1910 was no more in accord with the sensational descriptions given out
by astronomers in advance than is a pale pebble with a brick-red
boulder.

I predict that next Wednesday, a large Chinaman, in evening clothes,
will cross Broadway, at 42nd Street, at 9 P.M. He doesn't, but a
tubercular Jap in a sailor's uniform does cross Broadway, at 35th
Street, Friday, at noon. Well, a Jap is a perturbed Chinaman, and
clothes are clothes.

I remember the terrifying predictions made by the honest and credulous
astronomers, who must have been themselves hypnotized, or they could not
have hypnotized the rest of us, in 1909. Wills were made. Human life
might be swept from this planet. In quasi-existence, which is
essentially Hibernian, that would be no reason why wills should not be
made. The less excitable of us did expect at least some pretty good
fireworks.

I have to admit that it is said that, in New York, a light was seen in
the sky.

It was about as terrifying as the scratch of a match on the seat of some
breeches half a mile away.

It was not on time.

Though I have heard that a faint nebulosity, which I did not see,
myself, though I looked when I was told to look, was seen in the sky, it
appeared several days after the time predicted.

A hypnotized host of imbeciles of us: told to look up at the sky: we
did--like a lot of pointers hypnotized by a partridge.

The effect:

Almost everybody now swears that he saw Halley's comet, and that it was
a glorious spectacle.

An interesting circumstance here is that seemingly we are trying to
discredit astronomers because astronomers oppose us--that's not my
impression. We shall be in the Brahmin caste of the hell of the
Baptists. Almost all our data, in some regiments of this procession, are
observations by astronomers, few of them mere amateur astronomers. It is
the System that opposes us. It is the System that is suppressing
astronomers. I think we pity them in their captivity. Ours is not
malice--in a positive sense. It's chivalry--somewhat. Unhappy
astronomers looking out from high towers in which they are
imprisoned--we appear upon the horizon.

But, as I have said, our data do not relate to some especial other
world. I mean very much what a savage upon an ocean isl