Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at last, and
popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere concerning the
volcanoes upon Mars.  The seriocomic periodical _Punch_, I remember,
made a happy use of it in the political cartoon.  And, all
unsuspected, those missiles the Martians had fired at us drew
earthward, rushing now at a pace of many miles a second through the
empty gulf of space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer.
It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift
fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they
did.  I remember how jubilant Markham was at securing a new photograph
of the planet for the illustrated paper he edited in those days.
People in these latter times scarcely realise the abundance and
enterprise of our nineteenth-century papers.  For my own part, I was
much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series
of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as
civilisation progressed.