Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/281

 was like a scene shown to me, very small and very distinctly painted, in a locket.

But that effect was not confined to this particular incident. A vast number of things that had happened before the coming of the comet had undergone the same transfiguring reduction. Other people, too, I have learned since, had the same illusion, a sense of enlargement. It seems to me even now that the little dark creature who had stormed across England in pursuit of Nettie and her lover must have been about an inch high, that all that previous life of ours had been an ill-lit marionette show, acted in the twilight. . ..

5

The figure of my mother comes always into my conception of the Change.

I remember how one day she confessed herself.

She had been very sleepless that night, she said, and took the reports of the falling stars for shooting; there had been rioting in Clayton and through Swathinglea all day, and so she got out of bed to look. She had a dim sense that I must certainly be mixed up in that troub