The outer pages belong entirely to the old period, the only parts of the paper that had undergone alteration are the two middle leaves.  Here we found set forth in a curious little four-column oblong of print, what has happened. This cut across a column with scare headings beginning, “Great Naval Battle Now in Progress.  The Fate of Two Empires in the Balance.  Reported Loss of Two More------”

These things, one gathered, were beneath notice now.  Probably it was guesswork, and fabricated news in the first instance.

It is curious to piece together the worn and frayed fragments, and reread this discolored first intelligence of the new epoch.

The simple clear statements in the replaced portion of the paper impressed me at the time, I remember, as bald and strange, in that framework of shouting bad English.  Now they seem like the voice of a sane man amidst a vast faded violence.  But they witness to the prompt recovery of London from the gas; the new, swift energy of rebound in that huge population.  I am surprised now, as I reread, to note how much research, experiment, and induction must have been accomplished in the day that elapsed before the paper was printed. . . .  But that is by the way.  As I sit and muse over this partly carbonized sheet, that same curious remote vision comes again to me that quickened in my mind that morning, a vision of those newspaper offices I have already described to you going through the crisis.

The catalytic wave must have caught the place in full swing, in its nocturnal high fever, indeed in a quite exceptional state of fever, what with the comet and the war, and more particularly with the war.  Very probably the Change crept into the office imperceptibly, amidst the noise and shouting, and the glare of electric light that made the night atmosphere in that place; even the green flashes may have passed unobserved there, the preliminary descending trails of green vapor seemed no more than unseasonable drifting wisps of London fog. (In those days London even in summer was not safe against dark fogs.) And then at the last the Change poured in and overtook them.

If there was any warning at all for them, it must have been a sudden universal tumult in the street, and then a much more universal quiet.  They could have had no other intimation.

There was no time to stop the presses before the main development of green vapor had overwhelmed every one.  It must have folded about them, tumbled them to the earth, masked and stilled them.  My imagination is always curiously stirred by the thought of that, because I suppose it is the first picture I succeeded in making for myself of what had happened in the towns.  It has never quite lost its strangeness for me that when the Change came, machinery went on working.  I don’t precisely know why that should have seemed so strange to me, but it did, and still to a certain extent does.  One is so accustomed, I suppose,