Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/511

423 THE PICKWICK CLUB. 423

man of scientific attainments was seated in his library, two or three houses off, writing a philosophical treatise, and ever and anon moisten- ing his clay and his labours with a glass of claret from a veneral)le- looking bottle which stood by his side. In the agonies of composition, the elderly gentleman looked sometimes at the carpet, sometimes at the ceiling, and sometimes at the wall ; and when neither carpet, ceiling, nor wall afforded the requisite degree of inspiration, he looked out of the window.

In one of these pauses of invention, the scientific gentleman was gazing abstractedly on the thick darkness outside, when he was very much surprised by observing a most brilliant light glide through the air a short distance above the ground, and almost instantaneously vanish. After a short time the phenomenon was repeated, not once or twice, but several times : at last the scientific gentleman, laying down his pen, began to consider to what natural causes these appear- ances were to be assigned.

They were not meteors ; they were too low. They were not glow- worms ; they were too high. They were not will-o'-the-wisps : they were not fire-flies ; they were not fire-works. What could they be ? Some extraordinary and wonderful phenomenon of nature, which no philosopher had ever seen before ; something which it had been re- served for him alone to discover,, and which he should immortalise his name by chronicling for the benefit of posterity. Full of this idea, the scientific gentleman seized his pen again, and committed to paper sundry notes of these unparalleled appearances, with the date, day, hour, minute, and precise second at which they were visible, all of which were to form the data of a voluminous treatise of great research and deep learning, which should astonish all the atmospherical wiseacres that ever drew breath in any part of the civilised globe.

He threw himself back in his easy chair, wrapt in contemplations of his future greatness. The mysterious light appeared more brilliantly than before ; dancing to all appearance up and down the lane, crossing from side to side, and moving in an orbit as eccentric as comets them- selves.

The scientific gentleman was a bachelor. He had no wife to call in and astonish, so he rang the bell for his servant.

extraordinary in the air to-night. Did you see that?" said the scien- tific gentleman, pointing out of the window, as the light again became visible.
 * Pruffle," said the scientific gentleman, *' there is^ something very

'' Yes I did. Sir."


 * ' What do you think of it, Pruffle?"

"Think of it. Sir?"

" Yes. You have been bred up in the country. What should you say was the cause of those lights, now ?'

The scientific gentleman smilingly anticipated Pruffle's reply that he could assign no cause for them at all. Pruffle meditated.


 * < I should say it was thieves. Sir," said Pruffle at length.