e Cross-Roads and
the settlement and the blacksmith shop took possession of the
denizens of the region, and the coteries of amateur astronomers at
these centres were added to daily. Some remembered a comet or two in
past times, and if the deponent were advanced in years his hearers
were given to understand that the present luminary couldn't hold a
tallow dip to the incandescent terrors he recollected. There were
utilitarian souls who were disquieted about the crops, and anxiously
examined growing ears of corn, expecting to find the comet's influence
tucked away in the husks. Some looked for the end of the world; those
most obviously and determinedly pious took, it might seem, a certain
unfraternal joy in the contrast of their superior forethought, in
being prepared for the day of doom, with the uncovenanted estate of
the non-professor. A revival broke out at New Bethel; the number of
mourners grew in proportion as the comet got bigger night by night.
Small wonder that as evening drew slowly on, and the flaring,
assertive, red west gradually paled, and the ranges began to lose
semblance and symmetry in the dusk, and the river gloomed benighted in
the vague circuit of its course, and a lonely star slipped into the
sky, darkening, too, till, rank after rank, and phalanx after phalanx,
all the splendid armament of night had mustered, with that great,
glamourous guidon in the midst--small wonder that the ignorant
mountaineer looked up at the unaccustomed thing to mark it there, and
fear smote his heart.

At these times certain of the little sequestered households far among
the wooded ranges got them within their doors, as if to place between
them and the uncanny invader of the night, and the threatening
influences rife in the very atmosphere, all the simple habitudes of
home. The hearthstone seemed safest, the door a barrier, the home
circle a guard. Others spent the nocturnal hours in the dooryard or on
the porch, marking the march of the constellations, and filling the
time with vague speculations, or retailing dreadful rumors of strange
happenings in the neighboring coves, and wild stories of turmoil and
misfortune that comets had wrought years ago.

It was at one of these makeshift observatories that Justus Hoxon
stopped the first evening after his electioneering tour in the
interest of his brother. The weather had turned hot and fair; a
drought, a set-off to the surplusage of recent rain, was in progress;
the dooryar