body, aside from the fear of IT. Like an
assemblage in a burning building, the fear of each other was more
subtile and operative than the fear of the elements. By indefatigable
labor I got off the main thoroughfare and reached Hudson Street, and
here in the crowd I learned the latest news and discovered the cause of
the rapidly increasing excitement. I had run against an intimate friend
and associate, by accident. His first words were, as he wiped the
perspiration out of his eyes, "Well, this is awful, eh?"

"What's the news?" I asked.

"The latest is that The Death Line has moved. The Thurbers have a
private wire, and I just heard that Denver is cut off now! It looks as
if it was every man for himself."

So terrible was this announcement, and so engrossed was I with the
despairing thoughts that it gave rise to, that I took little heed of
what was going on about me until I reached Canal Street. The one dull
conviction that it was useless to fight against now was that
annihilation had set in; that some destroying wave had started out to
encircle the globe and that the race was doomed. Something, God alone
knew what, had happened to our planet, and humanity was to be swept away
in one of those cataclysms with which soulless Nature prepares for a new
order of existence.

I was rudely awakened from this reverie of wretchedness by the crowd
which surged against me with a blind, unvindictive violence. My one
desire was to get uptown to the woman I loved and had neglected, and I
saw that every minute was adding to the difficulty.

How I reached the Brevoort House I do not know. But there I found a
number of citizens who had not utterly lost their heads, and who had
come together for counsel. There was a private wire in the house, and
they were receiving intelligence from several central points in the
city. The looks of these men, who were huddled into the parlor, were
enough to dismay the most resolute observer. Their pale faces and
painfully set mouths indicated the sense of an awful crisis which wisdom
did not know how to meet or avoid. A well-known citizen read the
dispatches to them as they were received, and torn as I was by
impatience, my curiosity held me there to hear. It was now about
half-past eleven in the morning. The rapidity with which events had
moved since I got up was made startlingly apparent by the information
here furnished. The authorities, together with a number of influential
citizens, had come tog