e wilderness. As
it thus burst upon the vision of the three horsemen, each felt its power
in his own way,--the man of faith, the man of science, and the fanciful
boy,--each was differently but deeply moved. The men looked at the comet
as the wise and learned of the earth look at the marvels of another
world. The boy gazed quiveringly, like a harp struck by a powerful hand.
He strove to cast his fancies aside, and to remember what he had heard
before the comet had become visible to this country. He tried vainly to
recall the talk about it--not the idle and foolish superstitions which
Miss Penelope had mentioned, and which all the common people
believed--but the scientific facts so far as they were known. Yet even
his imagination failed to realize that this flaming head, with its
strange halo of darkness, and its horrible hair of livid green light,
was four million times greater than the earth; or that its luminous
veil--woven of star-dust so fine that other stars shone
through--streamed across one hundred million of miles, thick strewn with
other stars.

"Listen!" cried the doctor. "Hear that!" A distant roaring, like the
oncoming of a sudden storm, rolled upward from the mists and darkness
lying thicker around the swamp.

"There it is again!" Doctor Colbert went on, as if he had been waiting
and listening for the sound. "There must be great excitement at the
camp-meeting on this last night. Does it still interest you, Father? It
does me, intensely. This is not the usual peculiar excitement which
seems to belong to a crowd, though that, too, is always curious,
mysterious, and interesting. We all know well enough that for some
unknown reason a crowd will do wild, strange, and foolish things, which
the individuals composing it would never be guilty of alone. But this is
something entirely different and still more curious and mysterious.
Those people down yonder keep this up by themselves when they are
alone--it attacks some of them before they have ever seen one of the
meetings. It is certainly the strangest phenomenon of its kind that the
world ever saw. It never loses its painful fascination for me. I can't
pass it by. How is it with you?"

The priest hesitated before replying. "Any form of faith--the crudest,
the most absurd that any soul ever staked its salvation upon--must
always be the most interesting subject in the world to every thinking
mind."

"It seems so to me," the doctor replied. "And I assure you that