It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities.  Everywhere the local authorities discontinued street lighting—­one could read small print in the glare,—­and so at Monkshampton I went about through pale, white, unfamiliar streets, whose electric globes had shadows on the path.  Lit windows here and there burnt ruddy orange, like holes cut in some dream curtain that hung before a furnace.  A policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn woven of moonshine, a green-faced man opened to us, and there I abode the night.  And the next morning it opened with a mighty clatter, and was a dirty little beerhouse that stank of beer, and there was a fat and grimy landlord with red spots upon his neck, and much noisy traffic going by on the cobbles outside.

I came out, after I had paid my bill, into a street that echoed to the bawlings of two newsvendors and to the noisy yappings of a dog they had raised to emulation.  They were shouting:  “Great British disaster in the North Sea.  A battleship lost with all hands!”

I bought a paper, went on to the railway station reading such details as were given of this triumph of the old civilization, of the blowing up of this great iron ship, full of guns and explosives and the most costly and beautiful machinery of which that time was capable, together with nine hundred able-bodied men, all of them above the average, by a contact mine towed by a German submarine.  I read myself into a fever of warlike emotions.  Not only did I forget the meteor, but for a time I forgot even the purpose that took me on to the railway station, bought my ticket, and was now carrying me onward to Shaphambury.

So the hot day came to its own again, and people forgot the night.

Each night, there shone upon us more and more insistently, beauty, wonder, the promise of the deeps, and we were hushed, and marveled for a space.  And at the first gray sounds of dawn again, at the shooting of bolts and the noise of milk-carts, we forgot, and the dusty habitual day came yawning and stretching back again.  The stains of coal smoke crept across the heavens, and we rose to the soiled disorderly routine of life.

“Thus life has always been,” we said; “thus it will always be.”

The glory of those nights was almost universally regarded as spectacular merely.  It signified nothing to us.  So far as western Europe went, it was only a small and ignorant section of the lower classes who regarded the comet as a portent of the end of the world.  Abroad, where there were peasantries, it was different, but in England the peasantry had already disappeared.  Every one read.  The newspaper, in the quiet days before our swift quarrel with Germany rushed to its climax, had absolutely dispelled all possibilities of a panic in this matter.  The very tramps upon the high-roads, the children in the nursery, had learnt that at the utmost the whole of that shining cloud could weigh but a few score tons.