the wretched trifle of the other money, left in the
treasury after paying the last bills, for the largest
Alvan Clark telescope that we could buy; and we were
fortunate in obtaining cheap a second-hand one which
came to the hammer when the property of the Shubael
Academy was sold by the mortgagees. But we had, of
course, scarce a hint whatever as to where the miserable
object was to be found. All we could do was to carry the
glass to No. 9, to train it there on the meridian of No.
9, and take turns every night in watching the field, in
the hope that this child of sorrow might drift across it
in its path of ruin. But, though everything else seemed
to drift by, from east to west, nothing came from south
to north, as we expected. For a whole month of spring,
another of autumn, another of summer, and another of
winter, did Haliburton and his wife and Polly and I glue
our eyes to that eye-glass, from the twilight of evening
to the twilight of morning, and the dead hulk never hove
in sight. Wherever else it was, it seemed not to be on
that meridian, which was where it ought to be and was
made to be! Had ever any dead mass of matter wrought
such ruin to its makers, and, of its own stupid inertia,
so falsified all the prophecies of its birth! Oh, the
total depravity of things!

It was more than a year after the fatal night,--if it
all happened in the night, as I suppose,--that, as I
dreamily read through the "Astronomical Record" in the
new reading-room of the College Library at Cambridge, I
lighted on this scrap:--