“So it is with the whole human race,” said Challenger to me.  “They have all felt swimmy for a moment.  None of them have as yet any comprehension of what has occurred.  Each will go on with his interrupted job as Austin has snatched up his hose-pipe or the golfer continued his game.  Your editor, Malone, will continue the issue of his papers, and very much amazed he will be at finding that an issue is missing.  Yes, my young friend,” he added to the American reporter, with a sudden mood of amused geniality, “it may interest you to know that the world has swum through the poisonous current which swirls like the Gulf Stream through the ocean of ether.  You will also kindly note for your own future convenience that to-day is not Friday, August the twenty-seventh, but Saturday, August the twenty-eighth, and that you sat senseless in your cab for twenty-eight hours upon the Rotherfield hill.”

And “right here,” as my American colleague would say, I may bring this narrative to an end.  It is, as you are probably aware, only a fuller and more detailed version of the account which appeared in the Monday edition of the Daily Gazette—­an account which has been universally admitted to be the greatest journalistic scoop of all time, which sold no fewer than three-and-a-half million copies of the paper.  Framed upon the wall of my sanctum I retain those magnificent headlines:—­

TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS’ WORLD COMA
UNPRECEDENTED EXPERIENCE
CHALLENGER JUSTIFIED
OUR CORRESPONDENT ESCAPES
ENTHRALLING NARRATIVE
THE OXYGEN ROOM
WEIRD MOTOR DRIVE
DEAD LONDON
REPLACING THE MISSING PAGE
GREAT FIRES AND LOSS OF LIFE
WILL IT RECUR?

Underneath this glorious scroll came nine and a half columns of narrative, in which appeared the first, last, and only account of the history of the planet, so far as one observer could draw it, during one long day of its existence.  Challenger and Summerlee have treated the matter in a joint scientific paper, but to me alone was left the popular account.  Surely I can sing “Nunc dimittis.”  What is left but anti-climax in the life of a journalist after that!

But let me not end on sensational headlines and a merely personal triumph.  Rather let me quote the sonorous passages in which the greatest of daily papers ended its admirable leader upon the subject—­a leader which might well be filed for reference by every thoughtful man.

“It has been a well-worn truism,” said the Times, “that our human race are a feeble folk before the infinite latent forces which surround us.  From the prophets of old and from the philosophers of our own time the same message and warning have reached us.  But, like all oft-repeated truths, it has in time lost something of its actuality and cogency.  A lesson, an actual experience, was needed to bring it home.  It is from that salutory but terrible ordeal that we have just emerged, with minds which are still stunned by the suddenness of