the workers gathered in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and fled, politicians planned their schemes.  The presses of the newspapers roared through the night, and many a priest of this church and that would not open his holy building to further what he considered a foolish panic.  The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000—­for then, too, people had anticipated the end.  The star was no star—­mere gas—­a comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth.  There was no precedent for such a thing.  Common sense was sturdy everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the obdurate fearful.  That night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time, the star would be at its nearest to Jupiter.  Then the world would see the turn things would take.  The master mathematician’s grim warnings were treated by many as so much mere elaborate self-advertisement.  Common sense at last, a little heated by argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed.  So, too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightly business, and save for a howling dog here and there, the beast world left the star unheeded.

And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the star rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had been the night before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master mathematician—­to take the danger as if it had passed.

But hereafter the laughter ceased.  The star grew—­it grew with a terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had turned night into a second day.  Had it come straight to the earth instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt the intervening gulf in a day, but as it was it took five days altogether to come by our planet.  The next night it had become a third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw was assured.  It rose over America near the size of the moon, but blinding white to look at, and hot; and a breath of hot wind blew now with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented.  In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods.  And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and turbid, and soon—­in their upper reaches—­with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men.  They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the flying population of their valleys.