Not a sound, not a shadow, heralded the flare of yellow light which suddenly flashed out in the north-eastern heavens and spread latitudinally until the whole body of a Zeppelin--no small object even at twenty miles--stood out in glowing incandescence. Then a great sheet of pink-white flame shot up, and in the ripples of rosy light which suffused the earth for scores of miles I could read the gilded lettering on my binoculars. This was undoubtedly the explosion of the ignited hydrogen of the main gas-bags, and immediately following it the great frame collapsed in the middle and began falling slowly toward the earth, burning now with a bright yellow flame, above which the curl of black smoke was distinctly visible. A lurid burst of light--doubtless from the exploding petrol tanks--flared up as the flaming mass struck the earth, and half a minute later the night, save for the questing searchlights to east and south, was as black as ever again. Then perhaps the strangest thing of all occurred. London began to cheer. I should have been prepared for it in Paris, or Rome, or Berlin, or even New York, but that the Briton--who of all men in the world most fears the sound of his own voice lifted in unrestrained jubilation--was really cheering, and in millions, was almost too much. I pinched my arm to be sure that I had not dozed away, and, lost in wonder, forgot for a minute or two the great drama just enacted. Under my window half a dozen Australian “Tommies” were rending the air with “cooees” and dancing around a lamp-post, while all along the street, from doorways and windows, exultant shouting could be heard. For several blocks in all directions the cheers rang out loud and clear, distinctly recognisable as such; the sound of the millions of throats farther afield came only as a heavy rumbling hum. Perhaps since the dawn of creation the air has not trembled with so strange a sound--a sound which, though entirely human in its origin, was still unhuman, unearthly, fantastic. Certainly never before in history--not even during the great volcanic eruptions--has so huge a number of people (the fall of the Zeppelin had been visible through a fifty-to seventy-five-mile radius in all directions, a region with probably from 10,000,000 to 15,000,000 inhabitants) been suddenly and intensely stirred by a single event. It was undoubtedly the spectacularity of the unexpected _coup_ that had made these normally repressed millions so suddenly and so violently vocal. Many--perhaps most--stopped cheering when they had had time to realise that a score of human beings were being burned to cinders in the heart of that flaming comet in the north-eastern heavens; others--I knew the only recently restored tenements where some of them were--must have shouted in all the grimmer exultation for that very realisation. I can hardly say yet which stirred me more deeply, the fall of the Zeppelin itself or that stupendous burst of feeling aroused by its fall.