Review of Retiiewa, I/lO/oe. 



IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET. 



BY H. G. WELLS. 



BOOK THE FIRST-THE COMET. 



CHAPTER THE SECOND— NETTIE— (Con(jniied). 



SYNOPSIS; The narrator tells the story of the Great Change. When a young man he was a clerk in a pot^ 

 bank in Clayton. He is refused an increase in wages and gives up his position. His intimate friend is a socialist. 

 Parload, a man of his own age, who has, besides, a taste for science and is deeply concerned about a comet whose 

 path is approaching the earth's orbit. Why continue to think about socialism, he argues, when there is a pos- 

 sibility that the comet will hit the earth? Times are bad in England, on account of overproduction and the in- 

 trusion of American products in the English market. Strikes and lockouts exist throughout the country. The 

 narrator has been engaged to marry Nettie Stuart, but the engagement has been broken on account of his socialism 

 and religious doubt. However, he longa to see the girl again, and one Sunday afternoon arrives at her home in 

 Checkshill. 



III. 



It was three days after — on Wednesday, that is to 

 say — that the first of those sinister outbreaks oc- 

 curred that ended in the bloody affair of Peacock 

 Grove and the flooding out of the entire line of the 

 Swathinglea collieries. It was the only one of these 

 disturbances I was destined to see, and, at most, a 

 mere trivial preliminary. 



The acrounts that have been written of this affair 

 vary ven,- widely. To read them is to realise the 

 extraordinary carelessness of truth that dishonoured 

 the press of those latter days. In my bureau I have 

 .several files of the daily papers of the old time — I 

 collect them, as a matter of fact — and three or four 

 of about that date I have just this moment taken out 

 and looked through to refresh my impression of what 

 I .saw. They lie before me, queer, shrivelled, in- 

 credible things ; the cheap paper has already be- 

 cc»me brittle and brown and split along the creases, 

 the ink faded or smeared, and I have to handle 

 them with the utmost care when T glance among their 

 raging headlines. As I sit here in this serene place. 



their quality throughout, their arrangement, their 

 tone, their arguments and exhortations, read as 

 though they came from drugged and drunken men. 

 Thev give one the effect of faded bawling, of 

 screams and shouts heard faintly in a little phono- 

 graph. It is only on Monday I find, and buried 

 deep below the war news, that these publications 

 contain any intimation that unusual happenings were 

 forward in Clayton and Swathinglea. 



What I saw was toward evening. I had been 

 learning to shoot with my new possession. I had 

 walked out with it four or five miles across a patch 

 of moorland, and down to a secluded little coppice 

 full of bluebell's half way along the high road be- 

 tween Leet and Stafford. Here I had sj>ent the 

 afternoon, experimenting and practising with care- 

 ful deliberatiori and grim persistence. I had 

 brought an old kite-frame of cane with me, that 

 folded and unfolded, and each shot-hole I made 

 I marked and numbered to compare with my other 

 cndccivours. At last I was satisfied that I could hit 

 a playing card at thirty paces, nine times out of ten ; 

 the light was getting too bad for me to see my 



