tear that lies on dead men’s cheeks; for what is one poor insignificant man in his flesh against a whole world of the disembodied, he alone with them, and nowhere, nowhere another of his kind, to whom to appeal against them?  I read, and I searched:  but God, God knows ...  If a leaf of the paper, which I slowly, warily, stealingly turned, made but one faintest rustle, how did that reveille boom in echoes through the vacant and haunted chambers of my poor aching heart, my God! and there was a cough in my throat which for a cruelly long time I would not cough, till it burst in horrid clamour from my lips, sending crinkles of cold through my inmost blood.  For with the words which I read were all mixed up visions of crawling hearses, wails, and lugubrious crapes, and piercing shrieks of madness in strange earthy vaults, and all the mournfulness of the black Vale of Death, and the tragedy of corruption.  Twice during the ghostly hours of that night the absolute and undeniable certainty that some presence—­some most gashly silent being—­stood at my right elbow, so thrilled me, that I leapt to my feet to confront it with clenched fists, and hairs that bristled stiff in horror and frenzy.  After that second time I must have fainted; for when it was broad day, I found my dropped head over the file of papers, supported on my arms.  And I resolved then never again after sunset to remain in any house:  for that night was enough to kill a horse, my good God; and that this is a haunted planet I know.

* * * * *

What I read in the Times was not very definite, for how could it be? but in the main it confirmed inferences which I had myself drawn, and fairly satisfied my mind.

There had been a battle royal in the paper between my old collaborator Professor Stanistreet and Dr. Martin Rogers, and never could I have conceived such an indecorous piece of business, men like them calling one another ‘tyro,’ ‘dreamer,’ and in one place ‘block-head.’  Stanistreet denied that the perfumed odour of almonds attributed to the advancing cloud could be due to anything but the excited fancy of the reporting fugitives, because, said he, it was unknown that either Cn, HCn, or K_4FeCn_6 had been given out by volcanoes, and the destructiveness to life of the travelling cloud could only be owing to CO and CO_2.  To this Rogers, in an article characterised by extraordinary heat, replied that he could not understand how even a ’tyro’(!) in chemical and geological phenomena would venture to rush into print with the statement that HCn had not commonly been given out by volcanoes:  that it had been, he said, was perfectly certain; though whether it had been or not could not affect the decision of a reasoning mind as to whether it was being:  for that cyanogen, as a matter of fact, was not rare in nature, though not directly occurring, being one of the products of the common distillation of pit-coal, and found in roots, peaches, almonds,