Читать книгу The Perfect World. A romance of strange people and strange places онлайн

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Ezra recovered from the shock, but his eyesight was gone forever.

“Destroyed by fire,” was the verdict of the eminent specialist who was called in to diagnose his case.

The story of the “Light” grew daily more terrifying. School children declared they saw it from the windows of their class-rooms, and when closely questioned about it, declared it was “a golden streak of fire, as thin as wire, that came rushing through the sky like lightning.”

Then men began to watch for it, but somehow it seemed to evade most of them, and for some time, solitary statements were all that could be obtained with reference to it.

“What do you make of it, Alan?” asked Desmond one day, after it had been seen by three different witnesses at the same time and in the same direction.

“I don’t know. Every one is not a liar, and at the same time every one cannot suffer from a like optical delusion. Every one who has seen this phenomenon agrees in every detail about its appearance.”

“Yes, even the children,” supplemented Desmond.