I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table
still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had
left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder.  For a space I
stood reading over my abandoned arguments.  It was a paper on the
probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the
civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a
prophecy: "In about two hundred years," I had written, "we may
expect----"  The sentence ended abruptly.  I remembered my inability
to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had
broken off to get my _Daily Chronicle_ from the newsboy.  I remembered
how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had
listened to his odd story of "Men from Mars."