This account of his occupation increased the interest his look had excited in me, and I have observed him more particularly and found out more about him.  Sometimes, after a long night’s watching, he looks so pale and worn, that one would think the cold moonlight had stricken him with some malign effluence such as it is fabled to send upon those who sleep in it.  At such times he seems more like one who has come from a planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of us terrestrial creatures.  His home is truly in the heavens, and he practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to that of Saint Simeon Stylites.  Yet they tell me he might live in luxury if he spent on himself what he spends on science.  His knowledge is of that strange, remote character, that it seems sometimes almost superhuman.  He knows the ridges and chasms of the moon as a surveyor knows a garden-plot he has measured.  He watches the snows that gather around the poles of Mars; he is on the lookout for the expected comet at the moment when its faint stain of diffused light first shows itself; he analyzes the ray that comes from the sun’s photosphere; he measures the rings of Saturn; he counts his asteroids to see that none are missing, as the shepherd counts the sheep in his flock.  A strange unearthly being; lonely, dwelling far apart from the thoughts and cares of the planet on which he lives,—­an enthusiast who gives his life to knowledge; a student of antiquity, to whom the records of the geologist are modern pages in the great volume of being, and the pyramids a memorandum of yesterday, as the eclipse or occultation that is to take place thousands of years hence is an event of to-morrow in the diary without beginning and without end where he enters the aspect of the passing moment as it is read on the celestial dial.

In very marked contrast with this young man is the something more than middle-aged Register of Deeds, a rusty, sallow, smoke-dried looking personage, who belongs to this earth as exclusively as the other belongs to the firmament.  His movements are as mechanical as those of a pendulum,—­to the office, where he changes his coat and plunges into messuages and building-lots; then, after changing his coat again, back to our table, and so, day by day, the dust of years gradually gathering around him as it does on the old folios that fill the shelves all round the great cemetery of past transactions of which he is the sexton.

Of the Salesman who sits next him, nothing need be said except that he is good-looking, rosy, well-dressed, and of very polite manners, only a little more brisk than the approved style of carriage permits, as one in the habit of springing with a certain alacrity at the call of a customer.

You would like to see, I don’t doubt, how we sit at the table, and I will help you by means of a diagram which shows the present arrangement of our seats.