r Sunday clothes. They all went out into the garden together,
their minds divided between admiration at the gloriousness of the
spectacle and a great and growing awe. They were Dissenters, and
very religious people out of business hours, and it seemed to them
in those last magnificent moments that, after all, science must be
wrong and the fanatics right. With the green vapors came
conviction, and they prepared to meet their God. . . .

This man, you must understand, was a common-looking man, in his
shirt-sleeves and with an apron about his paunch, and he told his
story in an Anglian accent that sounded mean and clipped to my
Staffordshire ears; he told his story without a thought of pride,
and as it were incidentally, and yet he gave me a vision of something
heroic.

These people did not run hither and thither as many people did. These
four simple, common people stood beyond their back door in their
garden pathway between the gooseberry bushes, with the terrors
of their God and His Judgments closing in upon them, swiftly
and wonderfully--and there they began to sing. There they stood,
father and mother and two daughters, chanting out stoutly, but no
doubt a little flatly after the manner of their kind--

"In Zion's Hope abiding,
My soul in Triumph sings---"

until one by one they fell, and lay still.

The postmaster had heard them in the gathering darkness,
"In Zion's Hope abiding." . . .

It was the most extraordinary thing in the world to hear this flushed
and happy-eyed man telling that story of his recent death. It did
not seem at all possible to have happened in the last twelve hours.
It was minute and remote, these people who went singing through
the darkling to their God. It was like a scene shown to me, very
small and very distinctly painted, in a locket.

But that effect was not confined to this particular thing. A vast
number of things that had happened before the coming of the comet
had undergone the same transfiguring reduction. Other people, too,
I have learnt since, had the same illusion, a sense of enlargement.
It seems to me even now that the little dark creature who had
stormed across England in pursuit of Nettie and her lover must
have been about an inch high, that all that previous life of ours
had been an ill-lit marionette show, acted in the twilight. . . .

Section 5

The figure of my mother comes always into my conception of the
Change.

I remember how one day she confessed