THE BRICK MOON.
[From the Papers of Colonel Frederic Ingham.]
III. FULFILMENT.
LOOKING back upon it now, it
seems inconceivable that we
said as little to each other as we
did, of this horrible catastrophe. That
night we did not pretend to sleep.
We sat in one of the deserted cabins,
now talking fast, now sitting and
brooding, without speaking, perhaps,
for hours. Riding back the next day
to meet the women and children, we
still brooded, or we discussed this " if,"
that "if," and yet others. But after
we had once opened it all to them,—
and when we had once answered the
children's horribly naïve questions as
best we could,—we very seldom spoke
to each other of it again. It was too
hateful, all of it, to talk about. I went
round to Tom Coram's office one day,
and told him all I knew. He saw it
was dreadful to me, and, with his eyes
full, just squeezed my hand, and never
said one word more. We -lay awake
nights, pondering and wondering, but
hardly ever did I to Haliburton or he
to me explain our respective notions as
they came and went. I believe my gen-
eral impression was that of which I have
spoken, that they were all burned to
death on the instant, as the little aero-
lite fused in its passage through our
atmosphere. I believe Haliburton's
thought more often was that they were
conscious of what had happened, and
gasped out their lives in one or two
breathless minutes,—so horribly long !
—as they shot outside of our atmos-
phere. But it was all too terrible for
words. And that which we could not
but think upon, in those dreadful wak-
ing nights, we scarcely whispered even
to our wives.
Of course I looked and he looked for the miserable thing. But we looked in vain. I returned to the few subscrib- ers the money which I had scraped together towards whitewashing the moon,—"shrouding its guilty face with innocent white " indeed ! But we agreed to spend the wretched trifle of the other money, left in the treasury after paying the last bills, for the largest Alvan Clark telescope that we could buy ; and we were fortunate in obtain- ing cheap a second-hand one which came to the hammer when the property of the Shubael Academy was sold by the mortgagees. But we had, of course^ scarce a hint whatever as to where the miserable object was to be found. AJ1 we could do was to carry the glass to No. 9, to train it there on the meridian of No. 9, and take turns every night in watching the field, in the hope that this child of sorrow might drift across it in its path of ruin. But, though every- thing else seemed to drift by, from east to west, nothing came from south to north, as we expected. For a whole month of spring, another of autumn, another of summer, and another of win- ter, did Haliburton and his wife and Polly and I glue our eyes to that eye- glass, from the twilight of evening to the twilight of morning, and the dead hulk never hove in sight. Wherever else it was, it seemed not to be on that meridian, which was where it ought to be and was made to be ! Had ever any dead mass of matter wrought such ruin to its makers, and, of its own stupid inertia, so falsified all the prophecies of its birth ! O, the total depravity of things !
It was more than a year after the fatal night,—if it all happened in the night, as I suppose, that, as I dream- ily read through the " Astronomical Record " in the new reading-room of the College Library at Cambridge, I lighted on this scrap:—
"Professor Karl Zitta of Breslau writes to the Astronomische Nachrichten to claim the discovery of a new asteroid observed by him on the night of March 31st.
