The foremost tentacle wound round him; began to lift him. He felt it carefully with his hands. “It is dry,” he shouted—“_dry!_” _Then he put the candle to it!_ There was a wilderness of white light. Then a purple darkness. I heard the professor fall. When our eyes recovered from their dazed blindness the weed was utterly gone. The daylight was streaming into the hole in the wall, and the professor was picking himself up from the floor. His hair and beard were badly singed, and his eyebrows were gone. “It dried too fast,” he told us, with a queer angry chuckle. “That was its weakness. It dried—dried——” He kept on repeating the word in a dull, aimless tone. The rest repeated it vacantly after him. Viva was the first to speak coherently—a faint whisper in my ear. “My dear!” she said. “My _dear_!” Lady Evelyn spoke next—to ex-card sharper Steel. “The world begins afresh,” she said; “and—you _have_ met me, Mr. Steel.” The tears rolled down her cheek and his, and they stood smiling at each other. “The world begins afresh,” the professor called in a loud voice. “Come with me and make it a better world.” He strode toward the light, but some held back. “The weed!” they cried timorously. “The weed has gone—burned in an instant, from the end of the world to the end of the world!” he assured them. “Follow me.” We followed him out of the darkness into the sunlight. It was a mild, bright day for November, and a pleasant air. The weed had disappeared entirely, as the professor predicted; and, speaking generally, the conflagration had been too sudden to do much harm; but most of the buildings had subsided upon the sudden destruction of the weed-roots which had undermined them. Here and there houses, stones and timber had caught fire; and in many districts the fire spread, and lasted for days. The statistics, which are being prepared in the New Department for the Service of the People, over which I have the honor to preside, are not yet quite complete; but I may mention that seventeen per cent. of the buildings on the north of the Thames are found to have been destroyed, and ninety-three per cent. on the south—the wind having blown mainly in that direction; and that the destruction of property in Great Britain and Ireland generally is roughly estimated at fifty-five per cent. The adventures of our little band, after we came out from our hiding-place, scarcely belong to this story; but I must set down a few events which stand out in red letters in our calendar of the world after the Gray Weed.