Our Favorite Asterisk of All Time?

Check out the very special asterisk in this little verse from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle, 1887.  It stands for the word gloom (in all fairness, how much clarity can we expect of gloominess?) even as it concentrates what little light there is into a gleam in a house cat's eye.  Is the asterisk here a genuine example of visual poetry, or did the typesetter run out of space and improvise grandly?  We don't care, as the result stands.  (Note that we hunted down what would appear to be the web's only other gloomy asterisk, if only to give the cat's other eye a twinkle.)