ed it on its former
visit, for thus splendidly does astronomy honor its votaries. Less
scientific people regarded it askance as in some sort harbinger of
woe, and spoke of presage, recalling other comets, and the commotions
that came in their train--from the Deluge, with the traditional
cometary influences rife in the breaking up of "the fountains of the
great deep," to the victories of Mohammed II. and the threatened
overthrow of Christendom, and even down to our own war of 1812.
Others, again, scorned superstition, and entertained merely practical
misgivings concerning the weight, density, and temperature of the
comet, lest the eccentric aerial wanderer should run amuck of the
earth in some confusion touching the right of way through space.

Meanwhile, it grew from the semblance of a vaporous tissue--an
illuminated haze only discernible through the telescope, the private
view of the favored few--till it gradually became visible to the
unassisted eye of the _profanum vulgus_, and finally it flamed across
the darkling spaces with its white crown of glory, its splendid
wing-like train, and its effect of motion as of a wondrous flight
among the stars--and all the world, and, for aught we know, many
worlds, gazed at it.

Only in some great desert, the vast stretches of unsailed seas, or the
depths of uninhabited forests, were its supernal splendors unnoted. It
sunk as wistful, as tremulous, a reflection in a lonely pool in the
dense mountain wilds as any simple star, a familiar of these haunts,
that had looked down to mark its responsive image year after year,
for countless ages, whenever the season brought it, in its place in
the glittering mail of the Archer, or among the jewels of the Northern
Crown, once more to the spot it had known and its tryst with its fair
semblance in the water.

The great silver flake which the comet struck out upon the serene
surface lay glinting there among the lesser stellar reflections, when
a man, kneeling in a gully of the steep bank sloping to the "salt
lick," leaned forward suddenly to gaze at it; then, with a gasp,
turned his eyes upward to that flaming blade drawn athwart the
peaceful sky. He did not utter a sound. The habit of silence essential
to the deer-hunter kept its mechanical hold upon his nerves. Only the
hand with which he grasped the half-exposed roots of a great
sycamore-tree, denuded in some partial caving of the bank long ago,
relaxed and trembled slightly.

He was