The Casting Vote by Mary Noailles Murfree — Read

An election of civil and judicial officers was impending in Kildeer County when a comet appeared in the July sky, a mysterious, aloof, uncanny presence, that invaded the night and the stereotyped routine of nature with that gruesome effect of the phenomenal which gives to the mind so definite a realization of how dear and secure is the prosaic sense of custom.

All the lenses of the great observatories of the world had, in a manner, sought to entertain the strange visitant of the heavens. The learned had gone so far as to claim its acquaintance, to recognize it as the returning comet of a date long gone by. It even carried amidst its shining glories, along the far unimagined ways of its orbit, the name of a human being -- of the man who had discovered it on its former visit, for thus splendidly does astronomy honor its votaries. Less scientific people regarded it askance as in some sort harbinger of woe, and spoke of presage, recalling other comets, and the commotions that came in their train -- from the Deluge, with the traditional cometary influences rife in the breaking up of "the fountains of the great deep," to the victories of Mohammed II. and the threatened overthrow of Christendom, and even down to our own war of 1812. Others, again, scorned superstition, and entertained merely practical misgivings concerning the weight, density, and temperature of the comet, lest the eccentric aerial wanderer should run amuck of the earth in some confusion touching the right of way through space.