,
fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space, and the heat
of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast
mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before the
dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward
and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all
those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors,
habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of
its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and
hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night.

And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on
hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the
rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it,
like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into
existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger,"
they cried. "It is brighter!" And indeed the moon, a quarter full and
sinking in the west, was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but
scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little
circle of the strange new star.

"It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the
dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one
another. "_It is nearer_!" they said. "_Nearer_!"

And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the clicking telegraph
took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand
cities grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Men writing in
offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, men
talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in
those words, "It is nearer." It hurried along awakening streets, it was
shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages, men who had read
these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting
the news to the passers-by. "It is nearer," Pretty women, flushed and
glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned
an intelligent interest they did not feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious!
How very, very clever people must be to find out things like that!"

Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to
comfort themselves--looking skyward. "It has need to be nearer, for the
night's as