lf to go on. I turned down St. John's Wood Road,
and ran headlong from this unendurable stillness towards Kilburn. I
hid from the night and the silence, until long after midnight, in a
cabmen's shelter in Harrow Road. But before the dawn my courage
returned, and while the stars were still in the sky I turned once more
towards Regent's Park. I missed my way among the streets, and
presently saw down a long avenue, in the half-light of the early dawn,
the curve of Primrose Hill. On the summit, towering up to the fading
stars, was a third Martian, erect and motionless like the others.

An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I
would save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on
recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the
light grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and
clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began
running along the road.

I hurried through the red weed that choked St. Edmund's Terrace (I
waded breast-high across a torrent of water that was rushing down from
the waterworks towards the Albert Road), and emerged upon the grass
before the rising of the sun. Great mounds had been heaped about the
crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it--it was the final and
largest place the Martians had made--and from behind these heaps there
rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the sky line an eager dog
ran and disappeared. The thought that had flashed into my mind grew
real, grew credible. I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling
exultation, as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster. Out
of the hood hung lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds
pecked and tore.

In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood
upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A
mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it,
huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered
about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid
handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a
row, were the Martians--_dead_!--slain by the putrefactive and disease
bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red
weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by
the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

For so it had come about, as indeed I and ma