ce of the building threw an unbroken image, massive and
sombre, on the sward. The low clustering roofs of the town had a thin
bluish haze hovering about them, and were all softly and blurringly
imposed on the vaguely blue sky and the dim hills beyond. Among them a
vertical silver line glinted, sharply metallic,--the steeple of a
church. Here and there a yellow light gleamed from a lamp within a
window. No sound came from the streets; all the life of the place
seemed congregated here.

There was a continual succession of postulants to gaze through the
telescope, some gravely curious, some stolidly iconoclastic and
incredulous, others with covert levity, and still others,
self-conscious, solicitous, secretly determined to affect to see all
that other people could see, lest some subtle incapacity, some
flagrant rusticity, be inferred from failure. These last were hasty
observers, scarcely waiting to adjust the eye to the lens, fluttered,
and prolific of inapt exclamations, which too often betrayed the
superficial character of the investigation. To this class did
Theodosia belong.

"Plumb beautiful!" she murmured under her breath, after a momentary
contact of her dazzled eye with the brass rim of the telescope.

"Try ag'in, 'Dosia!" exclaimed Justus, aghast at this perfunctory
dismissal of the comet, as she turned to go away.

She winced a little from his voice, clear, vibrant and urgent, for
Justus had no solicitude concerning the superior canons of Colbury
touching etiquette, and suffered none of her anxieties. She caught Dr.
Kane's eyes fixed upon him as she moved hastily away, and then he came
up beside Justus, who stood near the telescope.

"Let me explain the thing to you, Hoxon," he said. "Try a peep
yourself."

Justus glanced after her. Walter had joined her--not so soon, however,
but that she heard a half-suppressed criticism on her lover as he
turned to the telescope and Dr. Kane's exposition.

"Pity he's got no education--smart fellow, but can't even read and
write."

"Smart" enough to be an apt pupil. The others pressed close around,
listening to the measured voice of the physician and the quick,
pertinent questions of the star-gazer.

It is as an open scroll, that magnificent, wonder-compelling cult of
the skies, not the sealed book of other sciences. Since the days of
the Chaldean, all men of receptive soul in solitary places, the
sailor, the shepherd, the hunter, or the hermit, whether of the
wil