Last night the long-looked-for comet was visible at last to us in the north. In Manchester itself the haze which the smoke-stacks of industry gather over the city hid it from view, but out in the country parts of Lancashire and Cheshire the sky was beautiful and clear, and the brilliance of a moon reaching its full was not enough to blot it from sight. From the rising of the stars it hung there (so those who saw it tell us), just clear of the mists on the fields, pallid and strangely blurred beside the shining definiteness of Castor and Pollux to the right of it and the great constellation of Leo sprawling over its head. Its unfamiliarity made it easy for the eye to light upon it, but it was very dim and distant, and there was nothing but a faint luminosity about the edge to suggest to the naked eye the tail through which our planet had gone swimming in the past week. But because its fires glow pale and faint to us here we are not to think that two thousand years (so far we can trace back its appearances in history) have burnt it out. In America and other parts of the globe it has shone with all its former brilliance, accompanied by the same strange rout of terrestrial ecstasy and panic as it had in days gone by. When the time comes, no doubt each country will fit its appearance to their special catastrophes, and in history-books centuries after this Frenchmen will read that its coming was heralded by the flooding of their capital, and Englishmen will say that it killed a king. And last night returning Whit-week travellers peered at it from railway carriage windows and joked about the length of its tail.
