And yet it was from overhead that danger was coming. Far up in the sky
a star was falling. Why it fell no one knows; but fall it did. It came
hurtling out of space, like a great fiery dragon, leaving a long
flaming train across the sky that lit up the whole world like a torch.
The birds in the forest fluttered and screamed in fear. The wild
beasts crouched under the largest trees that were near. It looked as
though the whole world was on fire!

Many miles upward, if one goes so high, he comes to a place where
there is no air. As you come nearer the earth you begin to find some,
although very thin indeed. Then it grows thicker, till there is enough
for one to breathe and live in. But the air is wrapped around the
earth like a cushion, or like a peach around its stone; and you know
that even a cushion, or a football, or a bicycle tire can be blown up
with air so hard that it seems like a rock and would hurt if you
struck it. The star struck this cushion. It was flying so fast--
hundreds of miles a second, or in the time between two ticks of a
clock--that the air which it met did not have time to be pushed out of
its way, and it was like running up against a hard wall. There was an
enormous crash like thunder, but ten thousand thousand times as loud,
and that star broke all up into pieces.

The pieces flew every way. Some went scurrying off for hundreds of
miles and fell into the sea, where they made the water around them
boiling hot. Some probably flew back again the way the star had come.
Some perhaps flew high enough to fall into the moon itself! but one
piece, about as large as a bushel basket, came zipping downward at a
long angle, like a blazing ball of flame, for it had struck the air so
hard a blow that the heat of it had melted the fragment. Down it came,