THE TIME MACHINE

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a solitary white, ape-like creature running rather quickly up the
hill, and once near the ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some
dark body. They moved hastily. I did not see what became of them.
It seemed that they vanished among the bushes. The dawn was still
indistinct, you must understand. I was feeling that chill,
uncertain, early-morning feeling you may have known. I doubted
my eyes.

'As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on
and its vivid colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned
the view keenly. But I saw no vestige of my white figures. They were
mere creatures of the half light. "They must have been ghosts," I
said; "I wonder whence they dated." For a queer notion of Grant
Allen's came into my head, and amused me. If each generation die and
leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with
them. On that theory they would have grown innumerable some Eight
Hundred Thousand Years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four