the night, others only half, others not a quarter; how a very few never
sank out of sight at all except for daylight or clouds, and yet went
round and round with all the others; and why I called those the clock
of heaven; which gained, each night, four minutes, and only four, on
the time we kept by the sun.

"Pra-aise Gawd!" murmured Sidney. "Miss Maud, please hol' on tell
Mingo run' fetch daddy an' mammy; dey don't want dat sto'y f'om me
secon' haynded!" Mingo darted off and we waited. "Miss Maud, what de
white folks mean by de nawth stah? Is dey sich a stah as de nawth
stah?"

I tried to explain that since all this seeming movement of the stars
around us was but our own daily and yearly turning, there would
necessarily be two opposite points on our earth which would never move
at all, and that any star directly in line with those two points would
seem as still as they.

"Like de p'int o' de spin'le on de spinnin'-wheel, Miss Maud? Oh,
yass, I b'lieve I un'stand dat; I un'stan' it some."

I showed her the north star, and told her how to find it; and then I
took from my watch-guard a tiny compass and let her see how it forever
picked out from among all the stars of heaven that one small light, and
held quiveringly to it. She hung over it with ecstatic sighs. "Do it
_see_ de stah, Miss Maud, like de wise men o' de Eas' see de stah o'
Jesus?"

I tried to make plain the law it was obeying.

"And do it p'int dah dess de same in de broad day, an' all day
long?--Pra-aise Gawd! And do it p'int dah in de rain, an' in de stawmy
win' a-fulfillin' of his word, when de ain't a single stah admissible
in de ske-eye?--De Lawd's na-ame be pra-aise'!" Her father, mother,
and brother were all looking at it with her, now, and she glanced from
one to another with long heavings of rapture.

"Miss Maud," said Silas, in a subdued voice, "dat little trick mus' 'a'
cos' you a mint o' money."

"Silas," put in Hester, "you know dass not a pullite question!" But
she was ravening for its answer, and I said I had bought it for
twenty-five cents. They laughed with delight. Yet, when I told
Sidney she might have it, her thanks were but two words, which her lips
seemed to drop unconsciously while she gazed on the trinket.

They all sat down on the steps nearest below me, and presently,
beginning where I had begun with Sidney, I went on to point out the
polar constellations and to relate the age-worn story of Cepheus and
Cassi