“Of course,” proceeded William, “of course Perry Chumly did not have any canon, so what did the fellow do but let himself down with his arms and legs to the bottom of an old well, about thirty feet deep!  And, with the cold water up to his middle, and the frogs, pollywogs and aquatic lizards quarreling for the cosy corners of his pockets, there he stood, waiting for the sun to appear in the field of his ‘instrument’ and be eclipsed.”

“Ben, you are joking,” I remarked with some asperity; “you are taking liberties with science, Benjamin.  It can’t be meat, you know.”

“I tell you it is though,” was his excited reply; “it is just meat, I tell you!  And this other line, which at first I took for sodium, is bone—­bone, sir, or I’m an asteroid!  I never saw the like; that comet must be densely peopled with butchers and horse-knackers!”

“When Perry Chumly had waited a long time,” William went on to say, “looking up and expecting every minute to see the sun, it began to get into his mind, somehow, that the bright, circular opening above his head—­the mouth of the well—­was the sun, and that the black disk of the moon was all that was needed to complete the expected phenomenon.  The notion soon took complete obsession of his brain, so that he forgot where he was and imagined himself standing on the surface of the earth.”

I was now scrutinizing the cometic spectrum very closely, being particularly attracted by a thin, faint line, which I thought Ben had overlooked.

“Oh, that is nothing,” he explained; “that’s a mere local fault arising from conditions peculiar to the medium through which the light is transmitted—­the atmosphere of this neighborhood.  It is whisky.  This other line, though, shows the faintest imaginable trace of soap; and these uncertain, wavering ones are caused by some effluvium not in the comet itself, but in the region beyond it.  I am compelled to pronounce it tobacco smoke.  I will now tilt the instrument so as to get the spectrum of the celestial wanderer’s tail.  Ah! there we have it.  Splendid!”

“Now this old well,” said William, “was near a road, along which was traveling a big and particularly hideous nigger.”

“See here, Thomas,” exclaimed Ben, removing the magnifying glass from his eye and looking me earnestly in the face, “if I were to tell you that the coma of this eccentric heavenly body is really hair, as its name implies, would you believe it?”

“No, Ben, I certainly should not.”

“Well, I won’t argue the matter; there are the lines—­they speak for themselves.  But now that I look again, you are not entirely wrong:  there is a considerable admixture of jute, moss, and I think tallow.  It certainly is most remarkable!  Sir Isaac Newton—­”

“That big nigger,” drawled William, “felt thirsty, and seeing the mouth of the well thought there was perhaps a bucket in it.  So he ventured to creep forward on his hands and knees and look in over the edge.”