long
with them. Notwithstanding the absence of any collision with my body,
the overpowering attraction of the whole mass of meteors was overcoming
my tangential force and bearing me in their direction. At first I
rejoiced at this circumstance, for at any rate the comet would save me
from the dreadful fate of becoming an asteroid. A little further
reflection, however, showed me that I had gone from the frying-pan into
the fire. The direction of my expulsion from Menippe had been such that
I had fallen into an orbit that would have carried me around the sun
without passing very close to the solar body. Now, being swept along by
the comet, whose perihelion probably lay in the immediate neighborhood
of the sun, I saw no way of escape from the frightful fate of being
broiled alive. Even where I was, the untempered rays of the sun scorched
me, and I knew that within two or three hundred thousand miles of the
solar surface the heat must be sufficient to melt the hardest rocks. I
was aware that experiments with burning-glasses had sufficiently
demonstrated that fact.

But perforce I resigned myself to my fate. At any rate it would the
sooner be all over. In fact, I almost forgot my awful situation in the
interest awakened by the phenomena of the comet. I was in the midst of
its very head. I was one of its component particles. I was a meteor
among a million millions of others. If I could only get back to the
earth, what news could I not carry to Signor Schiaparelli and Mr.
Lockyer and Dr. Bredichin about the composition of comets! But, alas!
the world could never know what I now saw. Nobody on yonder gleaming
earth, watching the magnificent advance of this "specter of the skies,"
would ever dream that there was a lost astronomer in its blazing head. I
should be burned and rent to pieces amid the terrors of its perihelion
passage, and my fragments would be strewn along the comet's orbit, to
become, in course of time, particles in a swarm of aerolites. Perchance,
through the effects of some unforeseen perturbation, the earth might
encounter that swarm. Thus only could I ever return to the bosom of my
mother planet. I took a positive pleasure in imagining that one of my
calcined bones might eventually flash for a moment, a falling star, in
the atmosphere of the earth, leaving its atoms to slowly settle through
the air, until finally they rested in the soil from which they had
sprung.

From such reflections I was aroused by the ap