?'

'Oh, nothing, sir,' Hannah replied, looking out of the window with sad
apathy, 'only that there's a comet, they say.'

'A WHAT?' said the dying astronomer, starting up on his elbow.

'A comet--that's all, Master Swithin,' repeated Hannah, in a lower voice,
fearing she had done harm in some way.

'Well, tell me, tell me!' cried Swithin. 'Is it Gambart's? Is it
Charles the Fifth's, or Halley's, or Faye's, or whose?'

'Hush!' said she, thinking St. Cleeve slightly delirious again. ''Tis
God A'mighty's, of course. I haven't seed en myself, but they say he's
getting bigger every night, and that he'll be the biggest one known for
fifty years when he's full growed. There, you must not talk any more
now, or I'll go away.'

Here was an amazing event, little noise as it had made in the happening.
Of all phenomena that he had longed to witness during his short
astronomical career, those appertaining to comets had excited him most.
That the magnificent comet of 1811 would not return again for thirty
centuries had been quite a permanent regret with him. And now, when the
bottomless abyss of death seemed yawning beneath his feet, one of these
much-desired apparitions, as large, apparently, as any of its tribe, had
chosen to show itself.

'O, if I could but live to see that comet through my equatorial!' he
cried.

Compared with comets, variable stars, which he had hitherto made his
study, were, from their remoteness, uninteresting. They were to the
former as the celebrities of Ujiji or Unyamwesi to the celebrities of his
own country. Members of the solar system, these dazzling and perplexing
rangers, the fascination of all astronomers, rendered themselves still
more fascinating by the sinister suspicion attaching to them of being
possibly the ultimate destroyers of the human race. In his physical
prostration St. Cleeve wept bitterly at not being hale and strong enough
to welcome with proper honour the present specimen of these desirable
visitors.

The strenuous wish to live and behold the new phenomenon, supplanting the
utter weariness of existence that he had heretofore experienced, gave him
a new vitality. The crisis passed; there was a turn for the better; and
after that he rapidly mended. The comet had in all probability saved his
life. The limitless and complex wonders of the sky resumed their old
power over his imagination; the possibilities of that unfathomable blue
ocean were endless. Finer feats th