"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."

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