rains, is really a mote of dust, something
smaller than the smallest pin-prick, compared to that far-away sun up
there on the shoulder of Orion!"

"Stop!" I cried. "You're positively giving me a chill up my spine.
You're making me feel so lonesome, Gershom, that you're giving me
goose-flesh. You're not leaving me anything to get hold of. You
haven't even left me anything to stand on. I'm only a little speck of
Nothing on a nit of a world in a puny little universe which is only a
little freckle on the face of some greater universe which is only a
lost child in a city of bigger constellations which in turn have still
lonelier suns to swing about, until I go on and on, and wonder with a
gasp what is beyond the end of space. But I can't go on thinking about
it. I simply can't. It upsets me, the same as an earthquake would,
when you look about for something solid and find that even your solid
old earth is going back on you!"

"On the contrary," said Gershom as he put down his telescope, "I know
nothing more conducive to serenity than the study of astronomy. It has
a tendency to teach you, in the first place, just how insignificant
you are in the general scheme of things. The naked eye, in clear air
like this, can see over eight thousand stars. The larger telescopes
reveal a hundred million stars, and the photographic dry-plate has
shown that there are several thousands of millions which can be
definitely recorded. So that you and I are not altogether the whole
works. And to remember that, when we are feeling a bit important, is
good for our Ego!"

I didn't answer him, for I was busy just then studying the Milky Way.
And I couldn't help feeling that it must have been on a night like
this that a certain young shepherd watching his flocks on the uplands
of Canaan sat studying the infinite stairways of star-dust that
"sloped through darkness up to God" and was moved to say: "When I
consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars
which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, or
the son of man that Thou visitest him?"

"Yes, Gershom, it's horribly humiliating," I said as I squinted up at
those serene heavens. "They last forever. And we come and go out, and
nobody knows why!"

"Pardon me," corrected the literal-minded Gershom. "They do not last
forever. They come and go out, just as we do. Only they take longer.
Consider the Dipper up there, for instance. A hundred thousand years
f