me, and I knew that within two or three hundred thousand miles of the
solar surface the heat must be sufficient to melt the hardest rocks. I
was aware that experiments with burning-glasses had sufficiently
demonstrated that fact.

But perforce I resigned myself to my fate. At any rate it would the
sooner be all over. In fact, I almost forgot my awful situation in the
interest awakened by the phenomena of the comet. I was in the midst of
its very head. I was one of its component particles. I was a meteor
among a million millions of others. If I could only get back to the
earth, what news could I not carry to Signor Schiaparelli and Mr.
Lockyer and Dr. Bredichin about the composition of comets! But, alas!
the world could never know what I now saw. Nobody on yonder gleaming
earth, watching the magnificent advance of this "specter of the skies,"
would ever dream that there was a lost astronomer in its blazing head. I
should be burned and rent to pieces amid the terrors of its perihelion
passage, and my fragments would be strewn along the comet's orbit, to
become, in course of time, particles in a swarm of aerolites. Perchance,
through the effects of some unforeseen perturbation, the earth might
encounter that swarm. Thus only could I ever return to the bosom of my
mother planet. I took a positive pleasure in imagining that one of my
calcined bones might eventually flash for a moment, a falling star, in
the atmosphere of the earth, leaving its atoms to slowly settle through
the air, until finally they rested in the soil from which they had
sprung.

From such reflections I was aroused by the approach of the crisis. The
head of the comet had become an exceedingly uncomfortable place. The
collisions among the meteors were constantly increasing in number and
violence. How I escaped destruction I could not comprehend, but in fact