South Bridge. "The place," gasped Mr. Maydig,
"won't be the same place to-morrow. How surpris-
ed and thankful every one will be!" And just at
that moment the church clock struck three.
CHAPTER VIII
The Rotation of the Earth Stopped
SAY," said Mr. Fotheringay, "that's three
o'clock ! I must be getting back. I've got to
- at business by eight. And besides, Mrs,
Wimms " "We're only beginning," said Mr. Maydig, full of the sweetness of unlimited power. "We're only be- ginning. Think of all the good we're doing. When people wake " "But " said Mr. Fotheringay. Mr. Maydig gripped his arm suddenly. His eyes were bright and wild. "My dear chap," he said, "there's no hurry. Look": — he pointed to the moon at the zenith — "Joshua!" "Joshua," said Mr. Maydig. "Why not? Stop it." Mr. Fotheringay looked at the moon. "That's a bit tall," he said, after a pause. "Why not?" said Mr. Maydig. "Of course it doesn't stop. You stop the rotation of the earth, you know. Time stops. It isn't as if we were doing harm." "H'm!" said Mr. Fotheringay. "Well," he sighed, "I'll try. Here!" He buttoned up his jacket and addressed himself to the habitable globe, with as good an assumption of confidence as lay in his power. "Jest stop ro- tating, will you?" said Mr. Fotheringay. Incontinently he was flying head over heels through the air at the rate of dozens of miles a minute. In spite of the innumerable circles he was describing per second he thought; for thought is wonderful — sometimes as sluggish as flowing pitch, sometimes as instantaneous as light. He thought in a second, and willed. "Let me come down safe and sound. Whatever else happens let me' down safe and sound." Mr. Fotheringay Starts a Terrific Storm E willed it only just in time, for his clothes, heated by his rapid flight through the air, were already beginning to singe. He came down with a forcible, but by no means injurious, bump in what appeared to be a mound of fresh-turned earth. A large mass of metal and masonry extraordinarily like the clock-tower in the middle of the market square, hit the earth near him, ricochetted over him, and fle.w into stonework, bricks and cement, like a bursting bomb. A hurtling cow hit one of the larger blocks and smashed like an egg. There was a crash that made all the most violent crashes of his past seem like the sound of falling dust, and this was followed by a descending series of lesser crashes. A vast wind roared throughout earth and heaven, so that he could scarcely lift his head to look. For a while he was too breathless and as- tonished even to see where he was or what had hap- pened. And this movement was to feel his head and reassure himself that his streaming hair was still his own. "Lord!" gasped Mr. Fotheringay, scarce able to speak for the gaie, "I've had a squeak! What's gone wrong? Storms and thunder. And only a minute ago a fine night. It's Maydig set me on to this sort of thing. Wtyat a wind! If I go on fooling in this way I'm bound to have a thundering accident! . . . "Where's Maydig?" "What a confounded mess everything's in!" He looked about him so far as his flapping jacket would permit. The appearance of things was really extremely strange. "The sky's all right anyhow," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And that's about all that is all right. And even there it looks like a terrific gale coming up. And even there's the moon over- head. Just as it was just now. Bright as midday. But as for the rest Where's the village? Where's — where's any thing? And what on earth set this wind a-blowing. I didn't order no wind." CHAPTER IX. A Strenuous Life ■R. FOTHERINGAY struggled to get to his feet in vain, and after one failure, remain- ed on all fours, holding on. He surveyed the moonlit world to leeward, with the tails of his jacket streaming over his head. "There's something seriously wrong," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And what it is — goodness knows." Far and wide nothing was visible in the white glare through the haze of dust that drove before a screaming gale but tumbled masses of earth and heaps of inchoate ruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only a wilderness of disorder, van- ishing at last into the darkness beneath the whirling columns and streamers, the lightnings and thunder- ings of a swiftly rising "storm. Near him in the livid glare was something that might once have been an elm-tree, a smashed mass of splinters, shivered from boughs to hase, and further a twisted mass of iron girders — only too evidently the viaduct — rose out of the piled confusion. You see when Mr. Fotheringay had arrested the rotation of the solid globe, he had made no stipu- lation concerning the trifling movables upon its sur- face. And the earth spins so fast that the surface at its equator is. travelling at rather more than a thousand miles an hour, and in these latitudes at more than half that pace. So that the village, and Mi'. Maydig, and Mr. Fotheringay, and everybody and everything had been jerked violently forward at about nine miles per second — that is to say much more -violently than if they had been fired out of a cannon. And every human being, every living creature, every house, and every tree— all the world as we know it — had been so jerked and smashed and utterly de- stroyed. That was all. Getting Rid of the Power of Performing Miracles TtESE things Mr. Fotheringay did not, of course, fully appreciate. But he perceived that his miracle had miscarried, and with that a great disgust of miracles came upon him. He was in darkness now, for the clouds had swept to- gether and blotted out his momentary glimpse of the moon, and the air was full of fitful struggling tortured wraiths of hail. A great roaring of wind £Goi]£iTvu,ed on page 380)
