eceived of a
certain prosaic person, a grocer, named Wiggins, and how he passed
through the Change. I heard this man's story in the post-office at
Menton, when, in the afternoon of the First Day, I bethought me to
telegraph to my mother. The place was also a grocer's shop, and I
found him and the proprietor talking as I went in. They were trade
competitors, and Wiggins had just come across the street to break
the hostile silence of a score of years. The sparkle of the Change
was in their eyes, their slightly flushed cheeks, their more elastic
gestures, spoke of new physical influences that had invaded their
beings.

"It did us no good, all our hatred," Mr. Wiggins said to me,
explaining the emotion of their encounter; "it did our customers
no good. I've come to tell him that. You bear that in mind, young
man, if ever you come to have a shop of your own. It was a sort
of stupid bitterness possessed us, and I can't make out we didn't
see it before in that light. Not so much downright wickedness it
wasn't as stupidity. A stupid jealousy! Think of it!--two human
beings within a stone's throw, who have not spoken for twenty years,
hardening our hearts against each other!"

"I can't think how we came to such a state, Mr. Wiggins," said
the other, packing tea into pound packets out of mere habit as he
spoke. "It was wicked pride and obstinacy. We KNEW it was foolish
all the time."

I stood affixing the adhesive stamp to my telegram.

"Only the other morning," he went on to me, "I was cutting French
eggs. Selling at a loss to do it. He'd marked down with a great
staring ticket to ninepence a dozen--I saw it as I went past. Here's
my answer!" He indicated a ticket. "'Eightpence a dozen--same as
sold elsewhere for ninepence.' A whole penny down, bang off! Just
a touch above cost--if that--and even then------" He leant over
the counter to say impressively, "NOT THE SAME EGGS!"

"Now, what people in their senses would do things like that?" said
Mr. Wiggins.

I sent my telegram--the proprietor dispatched it for me, and while
he did so I fell exchanging experiences with Mr. Wiggins. He knew
no more than I did then the nature of the change that had come over
things. He had been alarmed by the green flashes, he said, so much
so that after watching for a time from behind his bedroom window
blind, he had got up and hastily dressed and made his family get
up also, so that they might be ready for the end. He made them put
on thei