Fat city men are sometimes too matter-of-fact to understand the eccentricities of genius. This traveller simply went on--out of Palermo and out of this story--he and his wife and his daughter, his reeking horses and smart surrey. He beheld Aquarius Wharff actually engaged in his biggest job of prognostication---snuffing at the first of a train of events that “ripped open” Palermo--and yet he only clucked to his horses and drove on and never realised what he had observed. “Hard-times” Wharff had been standing for quite two hours in the broiling sun on the extreme corner of Asa Brickett’s grocery store platform. His attitude was familiar enough to his townsmen. He was on the tripod, so to speak, as a soothsayer, though it is hardly proper, perhaps, to speak of one leg as a tripod. He wearily balanced himself, shifting feet from time to time. His dingy old felt hat had the crown pinched to a peak and, before and behind, the broad brim was similarly pinched to peaks. The effect was somewhat that of a general’s chapeau, and its ludicrous illusion was heightened by a considerable assortment of rooster’s tail feathers thrust into the crown. When “Hard-times”--a name more generally employed locally than Aquarius--stood on one foot in front of Brickett’s store, his hat flattened fore and aft--‘twas known by local observers that he was having one of his “weather-vane spells.” Now, this little fancy harmed no one, and it was agreed in Palermo that no other resident could smell a change of weather so far ahead as Aquarius Wharff. If he stood on two feet, well balanced, and glowered grimly, he was merely indulging in a fancy for his own amusement. Though he never explained his ruminations to any one, it was suspected that he revelled in a proud triumph of the imagination and felt all the haughtiness of a bald-headed eagle. Certain it is that Palermo respected his abstraction and did not smile when he stroked his plumage and fixed a still more piercing gaze on the horizon. Aquarius Wharff believed--and his townsmen agreed--that as a weather-vane he was distinctly serviceable to Palermo. He would inveigh against the inaccuracy of the dingy, rusty arrow on the Union Meeting-house, and then would perk his nose into the wind, and rotate himself on his wavering leg to show his own superior manageability. When he permitted himself to play eagle it was purely for his own relaxation.