Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/280

 and the fanatics right. With the green vapours came conviction, and they prepared to meet their God. . ..

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 withaout 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 others did. The four of them 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