The mystery, the beauty, and the terror went beyond the black border of the forest. Out in the open and over the clearing, the mists from the swamp mingling with the darkness gave everything a look of fantastic unreality yet wilder than it had worn earlier in the night. Dense earth-clouds were thus massed about the base of Anvil Rock. Its blackened peak loomed through the clouds,--a strange, wild sight, apparently belonging neither to earth or to heaven. But far beyond and above was a stranger, wilder sight still; the strangest and wildest of all; one of the strangest and wildest, surely, that human eyes ever rested upon. There across the northern sky sped the great comet. Come, none ever knew whence, and speeding none ever knew whither, it reached on that night--on this fifteenth of October--the summit of its swift, awful, arching flight. It was now at the greatest of its terrible splendor and appalling beauty. It was now at the very height of its boundless influence over the hopes and fears of the superstitious, romantic, emotional, poetic race which was struggling to people the wilderness. As it thus burst upon the vision of the three horsemen, each felt its power in his own way,--the man of faith, the man of science, and the fanciful boy,--each was differently but deeply moved. The men looked at the comet as the wise and learned of the earth look at the marvels of another world. The boy gazed quiveringly, like a harp struck by a powerful hand. He strove to cast his fancies aside, and to remember what he had heard before the comet had become visible to this country. He tried vainly to recall the talk about it--not the idle and foolish superstitions which Miss Penelope had mentioned, and which all the common people believed--but the scientific facts so far as they were known. Yet even his imagination failed to realize that this flaming head, with its strange halo of darkness, and its horrible hair of livid green light, was four million times greater than the earth; or that its luminous veil--woven of star-dust so fine that other stars shone through--streamed across one hundred million of miles, thick strewn with other stars. "Listen!" cried the doctor. "Hear that!" A distant roaring, like the oncoming of a sudden storm, rolled upward from the mists and darkness lying thicker around the swamp.