The pitying sunbeams decked her brow But who may paint the crown she wore MAY M. ANDERSON. POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF A COMET (From Ragnarok.) Le material of a comet upon the earth. ET us try to conceive the effects of the fall of the We have seen terrible rain-storms, hail-storms, snowstorms; but fancy a storm of stones and gravel and claydust-not a mere shower either, but falling in black masses, darkening the heavens, vast enough to cover the world in many places hundreds of feet in thickness; leveling valleys, tearing away and grinding down hills, changing the whole aspect of the habitable globe. Without and above it roars the earthquaking voice of the terrible explosions; through the drifts of debris glimpses are caught of the glaring and burning monster; while through all and over all is an unearthly heat, under which rivers, ponds, lakes, springs, disappear as if by magic. Now, try to grasp the meaning of all this description. Look out at the scene around you. Here are trees fifty feet high. Imagine an instantaneous descent of granitesand and gravel sufficient to smash and crush these trees to the ground, to bury their trunks, and to cover the earth from one hundred to five hundred feet higher than the elevation to which their tops now reach! And this not alone here in your garden, or over your farm, or over your township, or over your county, or over your State; but over the whole continent in which you dwell-in short, over the greater part of the habitable world! Are there any words that can draw, even faintly, such a picture—its terror, its immensity, its horrors, its destructiveness, its surpassal of all earthly experience and imagination? And this human ant-hill, the world, how insignificant would it be in the grasp of such a catastrophe! Its laws, its temples, its libraries, its religions, its armies, its mighty nations, would be as the veriest stubble-dried grass, leaves, rubbish-crushed, smashed, buried under this heaven rain of horrors! But, lo! through the darkness, the wretches not beaten down and whelmed in the debris, but scurrying to mountain-caves for refuge, have a new terror: the cry passes from lip to lip, "The world is on fire!" The head of the comet sheds down fire. Its gases have fallen in great volumes on the earth; they ignite; amid the whirling and rushing of the debris, caught in cyclones, rises the glare of a Titanic conflagration. The winds beat the rocks against the rocks; they pick up sandheaps, peat-beds, and bowlders, and whirl them madly in the air. The heat increases. The rivers, the lakes, the ocean itself, evaporate. And poor humanity! Burned, bruised, wild, crazed, stumbling, blown about like feathers in the hurricanes, smitten by mighty rocks, they perish by the million; a few only reach the shelter of the caverns; and thence, glaring backward, look out over the ruins of a destroyed world. And not humanity alone has fled to these hidingplaces; the terrified denizens of the forest, the domestic animals of the fields, with the instinct which in great tempests has driven them into the houses of men, follow the refugees into the caverns. The first effect of the great heat is the vaporization of the waters of the earth; but this is arrested long before it has completed its work. Still, the heat is intense-how long it lasts, who shall tell? An Arabian legend indicates years. The stones having ceased to fall, the few who have escaped-and they are few indeed, for many are shut up forever by the clay-dust and gravel in their hidingplaces, and on many others the convulsions of the earth have shaken down the rocky roofs of the caves—the few survivors come out, or dig their way out, to look upon a changed and blasted world. No cloud is in the sky, no rivers or lakes are on the earth; only the deep springs of the caverns are left; the sun, a ball of fire, glares in the bronze heavens. But gradually the heat begins to dissipate. This is a signal for tremendous electrical action. Condensation commences. Never has the air held such incalculable masses of moisture; never has heaven's artillery so rattled and roared since earth began! Condensation means clouds. We will find hereafter a whole body of legends about "the stealing of the clouds" and their restoration. The veil thickens. The sun's rays are shut out. It grows colder; more condensation follows. The heavens darken. Louder and louder bellows the thunder. We shall see the lightnings represented, in myth after myth, as the arrows of the rescuing demi-god who saves the world. The heat has carried up, perhaps, onefourth of all the water of the world into the air. Now it is condensed into cloud. We know how an ordinary storm darkens the heavens. In this case it is black night. A pall of dense cloud, many miles in thickness, enfolds the earth. No sun, no moon, no stars, can be seen. "Darkness is on the face of the deep." Day has ceased to be. Men stumble against each other. The overloaded atmosphere begins to discharge itself. The great work of restoring the waters of the ocean to the ocean begins. It grows colder-colder-colder. The pouring rain turns into snow and settles on all the uplands and north countries; snow falls on snow; gigantic snow-beds are formed, which gradually solidify into ice. While no mile-thick ice-sheet descends to the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico, glaciers intrude into all the valleys, and the flora and fauna of the temperate regions become arctic; that is to say, only those varieties of plants and animals survive in those regions that are able to stand the cold, and these we now call arctic. In the midst of this darkness and cold and snow, the remnants of poor humanity wander over the face of the desolated world; stumbling, awe-struck, but filled with an insatiable hunger which drives them on; living upon the bark of the few trees that have escaped, or on the bodies of the animals that have perished, and even upon one another. Steadily, steadily, steadily-for days, weeks, months, years the rains and snows fall; and as the clouds are drained, they become thinner and thinner, and the light increases. It has now grown so light, that the wanderers can mark the difference between night and day. "And the evening and the morning were the first day." Day by day it grows lighter and warmer; the piledup snow begins to melt. It is an age of tremendous floods. All the low-lying parts of the continents are covered with water. Brooks become mighty rivers, and rivers are floods; the drift debris is cut into by the waters, re-arranged, piled up in what is called the stratified, secondary drift. Enormous river-valleys are cut out of the gravel and clay. The seeds and roots of trees and grasses, uncovered by the rushing torrents, and catching the increasing warmth, begin to put forth green leaves. The sad and parti-colored earth, covered with white, red, or blue clays and gravels, once more wears a fringe of green. The light increases. The warmth lifts up part of the water already cast down, and the outflow of the steaming ice-fields, and pours it down again in prodigious floods. It is an age of storms. The people who have escaped gather together. They know the sun is coming back. They know this desolation is to pass away. They build great fires and make human sacrifices to bring back the sun. They point and guess where he will appear; for they have lost all knowledge of the cardinal points. At last the great, the godlike, the resplendent luminary breaks through the clouds, and looks again upon the wrecked earth. Oh! what joy, beyond all words, comes upon those who see him! They fall upon their faces. They worship him whom the dread events have taught to recognize as the great god of life and light. They burn or cast down their animal gods of the pre-glacial time, and then begins that world-wide worship of the sun which has continued down to our own times. And from that day to this we live under the influencc of the effects produced by the comet. The mild, eternal |