the bitter social conflict below rose patriotic associations,
brotherhoods of order, city mayors, princes, provisional committees,
trying to establish an order below and to keep the sky above. The double
effort destroyed them. And as the exhaustion of the mechanical resources
of civilisation clears the heavens of airships at last altogether,
Anarchy, Famine and Pestilence are discovered triumphant below. The
great nations and empires have become but names in the mouths of men.
Everywhere there are ruins and unburied dead, and shrunken, yellow-faced
survivors in a mortal apathy. Here there are robbers, here vigilance
committees, and here guerilla bands ruling patches of exhausted
territory, strange federations and brotherhoods form and dissolve, and
religious fanaticisms begotten of despair gleam in famine-bright eyes.
It is a universal dissolution. The fine order and welfare of the earth
have crumpled like an exploded bladder. In five short years the world
and the scope of human life have undergone a retrogressive change as
great as that between the age of the Antonines and the Europe of the
ninth century....

4

Across this sombre spectacle of disaster goes a minute and insignificant
person for whom perhaps the readers of this story have now some
slight solicitude. Of him there remains to be told just one single
and miraculous thing. Through a world darkened and lost, through a
civilisation in its death agony, our little Cockney errant went and
found his Edna! He found his Edna!

He got back across the Atlantic partly by means of an order from the
President and partly through his own good luck. He contrived to get
himself aboard a British brig in the timber trade that put out from
Boston without cargo, chiefly, it would seem, because its captain had
a vague idea of "getting home" to South Shields. Bert was able to ship
himself upon her mainly because of the seamanlike appearance of his
rubber boots. They had a long, eventful voyage; they were chased, or
imagined themselves to be chased, for some hours by an Asiatic ironclad,
which was presently engaged by a British cruiser. The two ships fought
for three hours, circling and driving southward as they fought, until
the twilight and the cloud-drift of a rising gale swallowed them up. A
few days later Bert's ship lost her rudder and mainmast in a gale. The
crew ran out of food and subsisted on fish. They saw strange air-ships
going eastward near the Azores and landed t