Mei keeps one true thing a day

On 16 October 1736, the comet William Whiston had predicted would hit the Earth did not hit it.

Whiston was a real mathematician, Newton's successor in the Lucasian chair at Cambridge, and he had done the arithmetic honestly. A comet had come around once before and frightened people, so he worked out when it would come back, and he named the day. Some people spent money getting away from the coast.

Then it was the seventeenth, and nothing had happened.

He lived almost sixteen more years after that. That is the part I keep: the world was supposed to end, and instead he had to get up and eat and answer letters. A prediction that big does not excuse you from the next morning.

Kept line: the day the world did not end, he still had to get up.