id I
forget the meteor, but for a time I forgot even the purpose that
took me on to the railway station, bought my ticket, and was now
carrying me onward to Shaphambury.

So the hot day came to its own again, and people forgot the night.

Each night, there shone upon us more and more insistently, beauty,
wonder, the promise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveled
for a space. And at the first gray sounds of dawn again, at the
shooting of bolts and the noise of milk-carts, we forgot, and the
dusty habitual day came yawning and stretching back again. The
stains of coal smoke crept across the heavens, and we rose to the
soiled disorderly routine of life.

"Thus life has always been," we said; "thus it will always be."

The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded as
spectacular merely. It signified nothing to us. So far as western
Europe went, it was only a small and ignorant section of the lower
classes who regarded the comet as a portent of the end of the
world. Abroad, where there were peasantries, it was different, but
in England the peasantry had already disappeared. Every one read.
The newspaper, in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germany
rushed to its climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilities
of a panic in this matter. The very tramps upon the high-roads, the
children in the nursery, had learnt that at the utmost the whole
of that shining cloud could weigh but a few score tons. This fact
had been shown quite conclusively by the enormous deflections that
had at last swung it round squarely at our world. It had passed
near three of the smallest asteroids without producing the minutest
perceptible deflection in their course; while, on its own part, it
had described a course through nearly three degrees. When it struck
our earth there was to be a magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for
those who were on the right side of our planet to see, but beyond
that nothing. It was doubtful whether we were on the right side.
The meteor would loom larger and larger in the sky, but with the
umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness out, and at last
it would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green clouds, with
a white brightness about the horizon, west and east. Then a pause--a
pause of not very exactly definite duration--and then, no doubt,
a great blaze of shooting stars. They might be of some unwonted
color because of the unknown element that line in the green revealed.
For a