“I was a small bit of material, chiefly, if not entirely, composed of substances which are formed from the same chemical elements as those you find on the earth. Not improbably I may have had some iron in my constitution, and also sodium and carbon, to mention only a few of the most familiar elements. I only weighed an ounce or two, perhaps more, perhaps less—but you could probably have held me in your closed hand, or put me into your waistcoat pocket. You would have described me as a sort of small stone, yet I think you would have added that I was very unlike the ordinary stones with which you were familiar. I have led a life of the most extraordinary activity; I have never known what it was to stay still; I have been ever on the move. Through the solitudes of space I have dashed along with a speed which you can hardly conceive. Compare my ordinary motion with your most rapid railway trains; my journey will be done ere the best locomotive ever built could have drawn the train out of the station. Pit me against your rifle bullets, against the shots from your one-hundred-ton guns; before the missile from the mightiest piece of ordnance ever fired shall have gone ten yards I have gone 1,000 yards. I do not assert that my speed has been invariable—sometimes it has been faster, sometimes it has been slower; but I have generally done my million miles a day at the very least. Such has been my career, not for hours or days, but for years and for centuries, probably for untold ages. And the grand catastrophe in which I vanished has been befitting to a life of such transcendent excitement and activity; I have perished instantly, and in a streak of splendor. In the course of my immemorial wanderings I have occasionally passed near some of the great bodies in the heavens; I have also not improbably in former years hurried by that globe on which you live. On those occasions you never saw me, you never could have seen me, not even if you had used the mightiest telescope that has ever been directed to the heavens. But too close an approach to your globe was at last the occasion of my fall. You must remember that you live on the earth buried beneath a great ocean of air. Viewed from outside space, your earth is seen to be a great ball, everywhere swathed with this thick coating of air. Beyond the appreciable limits of the air stretches the open space, and there it is that my prodigious journeys have been performed. Out there we have a freedom to move of which you who live in a dense atmosphere have no conception. Whenever you attempt to produce rapid motion on the earth, the resistance of your air largely detracts from the velocity that would be otherwise attainable. Your quick trains are impeded by air, your artillery ranges are shortened by it. Movements like mine would be impossible in air like yours.