s of darkened cities
and indistinct, multitudinous, fleeing crowds, of wide country-sides of
chill dismay, of beasts silent with the fear of this last eclipse, and
bats and night-birds abroad amidst the lost daylight creatures and
fluttering perplexed on noiseless wings. Then the abrupt sight of the
countless stars made visible by this great abdication, the thickening of
the sky to stormy masses of cloud so that these are hidden again, the
soughing of a world-wide wind, and then first little flakes and then the
drift and driving of the multiplying snow into the dim illumination of
lamps, of windows, of street lights lit untimely. Then again, the shiver
of the cold, the clutching of hands at coats and wraps, the blind
hurrying to shelter and the comfort of a fire--the blaze of fires. One
sees the red-lit faces about the fires, sees the furtive glances at the
wind-tormented windows, hears the furious knocking of those other
strangers barred out, for, "we cannot have everyone in here". The
darkness deepens, the cries without die away, and nothing is left but
the shift and falling of the incessant snow from roof to ground. Every
now and then the disjointed talk would cease altogether, and in the
stillness one would hear the faint yet insistent creeping sound of the
snowfall. "There is a little food downstairs," one would say. "The
servants must not eat it.... We had better lock it upstairs. We may be
here--for days." Grim stuff, indeed, one might make of it all, if one
dealt with it in realistic fashion, and great and increasing toil one
would find to carry on the tale. M. Tarde was well advised to let his
hand pass lightly over this episode, to give us a simply pyrotechnic
effect of red, yellow, green and pale blue, to let his people flee and
die like marionettes beneath the paper snows of a shop window dressed
for Christmas, and to emerge after the change with his urbanity
unimpaired. His apt jest at the endurance of artists' models, his easy
allusion to the hardening effects of fashionable decolletage, is the
measure of his dexterous success; his mention of hotel furniture on the
terminal moraines of the returning Alpine glaciers, just a happy touch
of that flavouring of reality which in abundance would have altogether
overwhelmed his purpose.

Directly one thinks at all seriously of such a thing as this solar
extinction, one perceives how preposterously hopeless it is to imagine
that mankind would make any head against