udest blow in the act of departure.

They possessed a mysterious explosive, of unimaginable puissance, with
whose aid they set their car in motion for Mars from a point in Bergen
County, N. J., just back of the Palisades.

The force of the explosion may be imagined when it is recollected that
they had to give the car a velocity of more than seven miles per second
in order to overcome the attraction of the earth and the resistance of
the atmosphere.

The shock destroyed all of New York that had not already fallen a prey,
and all the buildings yet standing in the surrounding towns and cities
fell in one far-circling ruin.

The Palisades tumbled in vast sheets, starting a tidal wave in the
Hudson that drowned the opposite shore.

The victims of this ferocious explosion were numbered by tens of
thousands, and the shock, transmitted through the rocky frame of the
globe, was recorded by seismographic pendulums in England and on the
Continent of Europe.

The terrible results achieved by the invaders had produced everywhere a
mingled feeling of consternation and hopelessness. The devastation was
widespread. The death-dealing engines which the Martians had brought
with them had proved irresistible and the inhabitants of the earth
possessed nothing capable of contending against them. There had been no
protection for the great cities; no protection even for the open
country. Everything had gone down before the savage onslaught of those
merciless invaders from space. Savage ruins covered the sites of many
formerly flourishing towns and villages, and the broken walls of great
cities stared at the heavens like the exhumed skeletons of Pompeii. The
awful agencies had extirpated pastures and meadows and dried up the very
springs of fertility in the earth where they had touched it. In some
parts of the devastated lands pestilence broke out; elsewhere there was
famine. Despondency black as night brooded over some of the fairest
portions of the globe.

Yet all had not been destroyed, because all had not been reached by the
withering hand of the destroyer. The Martians had not had time to
complete their work before they themselves fell a prey to the diseases
that carried them off at the very culmination of their triumph.

From those lands which had, fortunately, escaped invasion, relief was
sent to the sufferers. The outburst of pity and of charity exceeded
anything that the world had known. Differences of race and religion were