confidence and curiosity, I began to read.

This is the story that happy, active-looking old man in that pleasant
place had written.

BOOK THE FIRST

THE COMET

CHAPTER THE FIRST

DUST IN THE SHADOWS

Section 1

I HAVE set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far
as it has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people
closely connected with me, primarily to please myself.

Long ago in my crude unhappy youth, I conceived the desire of
writing a book. To scribble secretly and dream of authorship was
one of my chief alleviations, and I read with a sympathetic envy
every scrap I could get about the world of literature and the
lives of literary people. It is something, even amidst this present
happiness, to find leisure and opportunity to take up and partially
realize these old and hopeless dreams. But that alone, in a world
where so much of vivid and increasing interest presents itself to
be done, even by an old man, would not, I think, suffice to set
me at this desk. I find some such recapitulation of my past as
this will involve, is becoming necessary to my own secure mental
continuity. The passage of years brings a man at last to retrospection;
at seventy-two one's youth is far more important than it was at
forty. And I am out of touch with my youth. The old life seems so
cut off from the new, so alien and so unreasonable, that at times
I find it bordering upon the incredible. The data have gone, the
buildings and places. I stopped dead the other afternoon in my walk
across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts of Swathinglea
straggled toward Leet, and asked, "Was it here indeed that I
crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and loaded
my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my
life? Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to
me? Rather, has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland
slipped a pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?"
There must be many alive still who have the same perplexities. And
I think too that those who are now growing up to take our places
in the great enterprise of mankind, will need many such narratives
as mine for even the most partial conception of the old world
of shadows that came before our day. It chances too that my case
is fairly typical of the Change; I was caught midway in a gust
of passion; and a curious accident put me for a time in the very
nucleus of the