two or three loafers and golf caddies who were
accustomed to hang about the railway station. There was very little
talking. Few of the common people in England had anything but the
vaguest astronomical ideas in those days. Most of them were staring
quietly at the big table like end of the cylinder, which was still as
Ogilvy and Henderson had left it. I fancy the popular expectation of
a heap of charred corpses was disappointed at this inanimate bulk.
Some went away while I was there, and other people came. I clambered
into the pit and fancied I heard a faint movement under my feet. The
top had certainly ceased to rotate.

It was only when I got thus close to it that the strangeness of
this object was at all evident to me. At the first glance it was
really no more exciting than an overturned carriage or a tree blown
across the road. Not so much so, indeed. It looked like a rusty gas
float. It required a certain amount of scientific education to
perceive that the grey scale of the Thing was no common oxide, that
the yellowish-white metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid
and the cylinder had an unfamiliar hue. "Extra-terrestrial" had no
meaning for most of the onlookers.

At that time it was quite clear in my own mind that the Thing had
come from the planet Mars, but I judged it improbable that it
contained any living creature. I thought the unscrewing might be
automatic. In spite of Ogilvy, I still believed that there were men
in Mars. My mind ran fancifully on the possibilities of its
containing manuscript, on the difficulties in translation that might
arise, whether we should find coins and models in it, and so forth.
Yet it was a little too large for assurance on this idea. I felt an
impatience to see it opened. About eleven, as nothing seemed
happening, I walked back, full of such thought, to my home in Maybury.
But I found it difficult to get to work upon my abstract
investigations.

In the afternoon the appearance of the common had altered very
much. The early editions of the evening papers had startled London
with enormous headlines:

"A MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS."

"REMARKABLE STORY FROM WOKING,"

and so forth. In addition, Ogilvy's wire to the Astronomical Exchange
had roused every observatory in the three kingdoms.

There were half a dozen flies or more from the Woking station
standing in the road by the sand pits, a basket-chaise from Chobham,
and a rather lordly carria