could be plotting injury to her parent orb. But there
is another inhabitant of the skies whose purposes have
not been similarly free from popular suspicion. Needless
to say I refer to the black sheep of the sidereal
family, that "celestial vagabond" the comet.

Time out of mind these wanderers have been supposed
to presage war, famine, pestilence, perhaps the
destruction of the world. And little wonder. Here is
a body which comes flashing out of boundless space into
our system, shooting out a pyrotechnic tail some hundreds
of millions of miles in length; whirling, perhaps,
through the very atmosphere of the sun at a speed of
three or four hundred miles a second; then darting off
on a hyperbolic orbit that forbids it ever to return, or
an elliptical one that cannot be closed for hundreds or
thousands of years; the tail meantime pointing always
away from the sun, and fading to nothingness as the
weird voyager recedes into the spatial void whence it
came. Not many times need the advent of such an apparition
coincide with the outbreak of a pestilence or
the death of a Caesar to stamp the race of comets as an
ominous clan in the minds of all superstitious generations.

It is true, a hard blow was struck at the prestige of
these alleged supernatural agents when Newton proved
that the great comet of 1680 obeyed Kepler's laws in its
flight about the sun; and an even harder one when the
same visitant came back in 1758, obedient to Halley's