seriousness.

The savants who had been interviewed overnight, did not talk very
convincingly, and made the mistake of flinging contempt on both Cosmo
and "the gullible public."

Naturally, the public wouldn't stand for that, and the pendulum of
opinion began to swing the other way. Cosmo helped his cause by sending
to every newspaper a carefully prepared statement of his observations
and calculations, in which he spoke with such force of conviction that
few could read his words without feeling a thrill of apprehensive
uncertainty. This was strengthened by published dispatches which showed
that he had forwarded his warnings to all the well-known scientific
bodies of the world, which, while decrying them, made no effective
response.

And then came a note of positive alarm in a double-leaded bulletin from
the new observatory at Mount McKinley, which affirmed that during the
preceding night _a singular obscurity_ had been suspected in the
northern sky, seeming to veil many stars below the twelfth magnitude. It
was added that the phenomenon was unprecedented, but that the
observation was both difficult and uncertain.

Nowhere was the atmosphere of doubt and mystery, which now began to hang
over the public, so remarkable as in Wall Street. The sensitive currents
there responded like electric waves to the new influence, and, to the
dismay of hard-headed observers, the market dropped as if it had been
hit with a sledge-hammer. Stocks went down five, ten, in some cases
twenty points in as many minutes.