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 herself.

She had been very sleepless that night, she said, and took the reports of the falling stars for shooting; there had been rioting in Clayton and all through Swathinglea all day, and so she got out of bed to look.  She had a dim sense that I was in all such troubles.

But she was not looking when the Change came.

“When I saw the stars a-raining down, dear,” she said, “and thought of you out in it, I thought there’d be no harm in saying a prayer for you, dear?  I thought you wouldn’t mind that.”

And so I got another of my pictures—­the green vapors come and go, and there by her patched coverlet that dear old woman kneels and droops, still clasping her poor gnarled hands in the attitude of prayer—­prayer to it—­for me!

Through the meagre curtains and blinds of the flawed refracting window I see the stars above the chimneys fade, the pale light of dawn creeps into the sky, and her candle flares and dies. . . .