tion increased the interest his look had
excited in me, and I have observed him more particularly and found out
more about him. Sometimes, after a long night's watching, he looks so
pale and worn, that one would think the cold moonlight had stricken him
with some malign effluence such as it is fabled to send upon those who
sleep in it. At such times he seems more like one who has come from a
planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of
us terrestrial creatures. His home is truly in the heavens, and he
practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to
that of Saint Simeon Stylites. Yet they tell me he might live in luxury
if he spent on himself what he spends on science. His knowledge is
of that strange, remote character, that it seems sometimes almost
superhuman. He knows the ridges and chasms of the moon as a surveyor
knows a garden-plot he has measured. He watches the snows that gather
around the poles of Mars; he is on the lookout for the expected comet at
the moment when its faint stain of diffused light first shows itself; he
analyzes the ray that comes from the sun's photosphere; he measures the
rings of Saturn; he counts his asteroids to see that none are missing,
as the shepherd counts the sheep in his flock. A strange unearthly
being; lonely, dwelling far apart from the thoughts and cares of
the planet on which he lives,--an enthusiast who gives his life to
knowledge; a student of antiquity, to whom the records of the geologist
are modern pages in the great volume of being, and the pyramids a
memorandum of yesterday, as the eclipse or occultation that is to take
place thousands of years hence is an event of to-morrow in the diary
without beginning and without end where he enters the aspect of the
passing moment as it is read on the celestial dial.

In very marked contrast with this young man is the something more than
middle-aged Register of Deeds, a rusty, sallow, smoke-dried looking
personage, who belongs to this earth as exclusively as the other
belongs to the firmament. His movements are as mechanical as those of
a pendulum,--to the office, where he changes his coat and plunges into
messuages and building-lots; then, after changing his coat again, back
to our table, and so, day by day, the dust of years gradually gathering
around him as it does on the old folios that fill the shelves all round
the great cemetery of past transactions of which he is the sexton.

Of the