How much they would have preferred being packed with the privileged ones that were listening to the pleading of the most gigantic case that has ever been and ever will be submitted to a judge’s decision!
Be it granted that popular excitement had been carried to its apparently extreme limits when the Paris Observatory published the news that the bolide, or at least the bolide’s nucleus, was of pure gold. Yet this delirium was nothing to be compared with that which had been aroused when Mr. Dean Forsyth and Dr. Sydney Hudelson predicted that the asteroid would fall. Innumerable were the people who went mad on the occasion; and in a few days all the lunatic asylums were found to be too small for the patients that they had to accommodate.
But, among all these mad persons, assuredly the madde
