"The instrument was fairly mounted when the clouds mounted to keep it
company, and the comet and I again parted.

"In all observations, the blowing out of a light by a gust of wind is a
very common and very annoying accident; but I once met with a much worse
one, for I dropped a chronometer, and it rolled out of its box on to the
ground. We picked it up in a great panic, but it had not even altered
its rate, as we found by later observations.

"The glaring eyes of the cat, who nightly visited me, were at one time
very annoying, and a man who climbed up a fence and spoke to me, in the
stillness of the small hours, fairly shook not only my equanimity, but
the pencil which I held in my hand. He was quite innocent of any
intention to do me harm, but he gave me a great fright.

"The spiders and bugs which swarm in my observing-houses I have rather
an attachment for, but they must not crawl over my recording-paper. Rats
are my abhorrence, and I learned with pleasure that some poison had been
placed under the transit-house.

"One gets attached (if the term may be used) to certain midnight
apparitions. The Aurora Borealis is always a pleasant companion; a
meteor seems to come like a messenger from departed spirits; and the
blossoming of trees in the moonlight becomes a sight looked for with
pleasure.

"Aside from the study of astronomy, there is the same enjoyment in a
night upon the housetop, with the stars, as in the midst of other grand
scenery; there is the same subdued quiet and grateful seriousness; a
calm to the troubled spirit, and a hope to the desponding.

"Even astronomers who are as well cared for as are those of Cambridge
have their annoyances, and even men as skilled as they are make
blunders.

"I have known one of the Bonds,[Footnote: Of the Harvard College
Observatory.] with great effort, turn that huge telescope down to the
horizon to make an observation upon a blazing comet seen there, and when
he had found it in his glass, find also that it was not a comet, but the
nebula of Andromeda, a cluster of stars on which he had spent much time,
and which he had made a special object of study.

"Dec. 26, 1854. They were wonderful men, the early astronomers. That was
a great conception, which now seems to us so simple, that the earth
turns upon its axis, and a still greater one that it revolves about the
sun (to show this last was worth a man's lifetime, and it really almost
cost the life of Galileo). Somehow