Suddenly our spectrum vanished, and a very singular one of a quite different appearance presented itself in the same place.  It was a dim spectrum, crossed by a single broad bar of pale yellow.

“Ah!” said Ben, “our waif of the upper deep is obscured by a cloud; let us see what the misty veil is made of.”

He took a look at the spectrum with his magnifying glass, started back, and muttered:  “Brown linen, by thunder!”

“You can imagine the rapture of Perry Chumly,” pursued the indefatigable William, “when he saw, as he supposed, the moon’s black disk encroaching upon the body of the luminary that had so long riveted his gaze.  But when that obscuring satellite had thrust herself so far forward that the eclipse became almost annular, and he saw her staring down upon a darkened world with glittering white eyes and a double row of flashing teeth, it is perhaps not surprising that he vented a scream of terror, fainted and collapsed among his frogs!  As for the big nigger, almost equally terrified by this shriek from the abyss, he executed a precipitate movement which only the breaking of his neck prevented from being a double back-somersault, and lay dead in the weeds with his tongue out and his face the color of a cometic spectrum.  We laid them in the same grave, poor fellows, and on many a still summer evening afterward I strayed to the lonely little church-yard to listen to the smothered requiem chanted by the frogs that we had neglected to remove from the pockets of the lamented astronomer.

“And, now,” added William, taking his heels from the window, “as you can not immediately resume your spectroscopic observations on that red-haired chamber-maid in the dormer-window, who pulled down the blind when I made a mouth at her, I move that we adjourn.”

A PROVIDENTIAL INTIMATION

Mr. Algernon Jarvis, of San Francisco, got up cross.  The world of Mr. Jarvis had gone wrong with him overnight, as one’s world is likely to do when one sits up till morning with jovial friends, to watch it, and he was prone to resentment.  No sooner, therefore, had he got himself into a neat, fashionable suit of clothing than he selected his morning walking-stick and sallied out upon the town with a vague general determination to attack something.  His first victim would naturally have been his breakfast; but singularly enough, he fell upon this with so feeble an energy that he was himself beaten—­to the grieved astonishment of the worthy rotisseur, who had to record his hitherto puissant patron’s maiden defeat.  Three or four cups of cafe noir were the only captives that graced Mr. Jarvis’ gastric chariot-wheels that morning.

He lit a long cigar and sauntered moodily down the street, so occupied with schemes of universal retaliation that his feet had it all their own way; in consequence of which, their owner soon found himself in the billiard-room of the Occidental Hotel.  Nobody was there, but Mr. Jarvis was a privileged person; so, going to the marker’s desk, he took out a little box of ivory balls, spilled them carelessly over a table and languidly assailed them with a long stick.