On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres
were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual
apparition in the heavens. "A Planetary Collision," one London paper
headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion that this strange new
planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader-writers enlarged
upon the topic. So that in most of the capitals of the world, on January
3rd, there was an expectation, however vague, of some imminent phenomenon
in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe,
thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see--the old familiar stars
just as they had always been.

Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead
grown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of
daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to
show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the
busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work
betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jaded
and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and, in the
country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the
dusky quickening country it could be seen--and out at sea by seamen
watching for the day--a great white star, come suddenly into the westward
sky!

Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star
at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling
spot of light, but a small, round, clear shining disc, an hour after the
day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared and feared,
telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by
these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold
Coast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of
the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star.

And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,
rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed
together, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and
spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel,
astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a
sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so
suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was had been struck