derness of nature or the isolation of crowds, have read there of
the mystery of the infinite, of the order and symmetry of the plan of
creation, of the proof of the existence of a God, who controls the
sweet influences of Pleiades and makes strong the bands of Orion. The
unspeakable thought, the unformulated prayer, the poignant sense of
individual littleness, of atomic unimportance, in the midst of the
vast scheme of the universe, inform every eye, throb in every breast,
whether it be of the savant, with all the appliances of invention to
bring to his cheated senses the illusion of a slightly nearer
approach, or of the half-civilized llanero of the tropic solitudes,
whose knowledge suffices only to note the hour by the bending of the
great Southern Cross. It is the heritage of all alike.

For Justus Hoxon, who had followed the slow march of the stars through
many a year in the troubled watches of the night, when anxiety and
foreboding could make no covenant with sleep, there was, in one sense,
little to learn. He knew them all in their several seasons, the time
of their rising, when they came to the meridian, and when they were
engulfed in the west, till with another year they sparkled on the
eastern rim of the sky. He listened to Dr. Kane's explanation of this
with an air of acceptance, but he hardly heeded the detail of their
distance from the earth and from one another--he knew that they were
far,--and he shook his head over speculations as to their physical
condition, vegetation, and inhabitation. "Ye ain't got no sort o'
means o' knowin' sech, Doctor," he said reprehensively, gauging the
depths of the ignorance of the wise man.

He heard their names with alert interest, and repeated them swiftly
after his mentor to set them in his memory. "By George!" he cried
delightedly, "I hed no idee they hed names!"

And as the amateur astronomer, pleased with so responsive a glow,
began the tracing of the fantastic imagery of the constellations,
detailing the story of each vague similitude, he marked the sudden
dawn of a certain enchantment in his interlocutor's mind, the first
subtle experience of the delights of the ideal and the resources of
fable. It exerted upon Dr. Kane a sort of fascinated interest, the
observation of this earliest exploration of the realms of fancy by so
keen and receptive an intelligence. The comet, the telescope, the
crowd, were forgotten, as with Hoxon at his elbow he made the tour of
the court