Review of Revieicg, l/T/06. 



IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET. 



BY H. G. WELLS. 



" T/ie World s Great Age begins anew, 



The Golden Years return, 

 The Earth doth like a Snake renew 



Her Winter Skin outworn: 

 Heaven smiles, and Faiths and Empires gleam 

 Like Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream." 



PROLOGUE. 



THE MAN VTBO WROTE IN THE TOWER. 



I saw a grey-haired difference, and that,"; new to me and strange. 



Ernest H. Mille 

 Mr. H. 



man, a figure of hale 

 age, sitting at a table 

 and writing. 



It seemed to be in 

 a room in a tower, 

 very high, so that 

 through the tall win- 

 dow on his left one 

 perceived only dis- 

 tances, a remote 

 horizon of sea, a 

 headland, and that 

 vague haze and glit- 

 ter in the sunset that 

 many miles away 

 marks a city. All 

 the appointments of 

 the room were order- 

 ly and beautiful, and 

 in some subtle 

 quality, in this small 



They 



were in no fashion I could name, and the simple 

 costume the man wore suggested neither period nor 

 country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future 

 or Utopia or the Land of Simple Dreams; an 

 errant mote of mernor)-, Henry James's phrase and 

 story of " The Great Good Place " twinkled across 

 my mind and passed and left no light. 



The man I saw wrote with a thing like a foun- 

 tain-pen, a modern touch that prohibited any his- 

 torical retrospection, and as he finished each sheet, 

 writing in an easy, flowing hand, he added it to a 

 growing pile upon a graceful little table under the 

 window. His last-done sheets lay loose, partly 

 covering others that were clipped together into 

 fascicles. Old as he certainly was, he wrote with a 

 steady hand. . . . 



Clearly he was unaware of mv presence, and I 

 stood waiting until his pen should come to a pause. 



I discovered that a concave speculum hung slant- 

 ingly high over his head ; a movement in this caught 

 my attention sharply, and I looked up to see dis- 



