"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 wilderness of nature or the isolation of crowds, have read there of the mystery of the infinite, of the order and symmetry of the plan of creation, of the proof of the existence of a God, who controls the sweet influences of Pleiades and makes strong the bands of Orion. The unspeakable thought, the unformulated prayer, the poignant sense of individual littleness, of atomic unimportance, in the midst of the vast scheme of the universe, inform every eye, throb in every breast, whether it be of the savant, with all the appliances of invention to bring to his cheated senses the illusion of a slightly nearer approach, or of the half-civilized llanero of the tropic solitudes, whose knowledge suffices only to note the hour by the bending of the great Southern Cross. It is the heritage of all alike.
For Justus Hoxon, who had followed the slow march of the stars through many a year in the troubled watches of the night, when anxiety and foreboding could make no covenant with sleep, there was, in one sense, little to learn. He knew them all in their several seasons, the time of their rising, when they came to the meridian, and when they were engulfed in the west, till with another year they sparkled on the eastern rim of the sky. He listened to Dr. Kane's explanation of this with an air of acceptance, but he hardly heeded the detail of their distance from the earth and from one another—he knew that they were far,—and he shook his head over speculations as to their physical condition, vegetation, and inhabitation. "Ye ain't got no sort o' means o' knowin' sech, Doctor," he said reprehensively, gauging the depths of the ignorance of the wise man.
He heard their names with alert interest, and repeated them swiftly after his mentor to set them in his memory. "By George!" he cried delightedly, "I hed no idee they hed names!"