A puzzle in the country of Mark Twain
Elmira, New York. A summer night, and a comet coming up over the hill. Somebody has left the lamp lit in the study.
The chapter is done. The lamp is out. The cat has the desk to herself.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835, two weeks after Halley's Comet passed the sun. He died on the 21st of April, 1910, the day after it came round again.
He wrote much of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in an eight-sided study on the hill at Quarry Farm.