when sufficiently near our sun to be in some degree illuminated by
his rays, it might run the chance at first of being mistaken for a new
planet. If such a body were as large, for instance, as our own sun, it
should, according to Mr. Gore's calculations, reveal itself to the
telescope some fifteen years before the great catastrophe. Steadily its
disc would appear to enlarge, so that, about nine years after its
discovery, it would become visible to the naked eye. At length the
doomed inhabitants of the earth, paralysed with terror, would see their
relentless enemy shining like a second moon in the northern skies.
Rapidly increasing in apparent size, as the gravitational attractions of
the solar orb and of itself interacted more powerfully with diminishing
distance, it would at last draw quickly in towards the sun and disappear
in the glare.

It is impossible for us to conceive anything more terrible than these
closing days, for no menace of catastrophe which we can picture could
bear within it such a certainty of fulfilment. It appears, therefore,
useless to speculate on the probable actions of men in their now
terrestrial prison. Hope, which so far had buoyed them up in the direst
calamities, would here have no place. Humanity, in the fulness of its
strength, would await a wholesale execution from which there could be no
chance at all of a reprieve. Observations of the approaching body would
have enabled astronomers to calculate its path with great exactness, and
to predict the instant and character of the impact. Eight minutes after
the moment allotted for the collision the resulting tide of flame would
surge across the earth's orbit, and our globe would quickly pass away in
vapour.

And what then?

A nebula, no doubt; and after untold ages the formation possibly from it
of a new system, rising phoenix-like from the vast crematorium and
filling the place of the old one. A new central sun, perhaps, with its
attendant retinue of planets and satellites. And teeming life,
perchance, appearing once more in the fulness of time, when temperature
in one or other of these bodies had fallen within certain limits, and
other predisposing conditions had supervened.

"The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains