beneath his
favorite authors, and his first thought in the morning is how to obtain
instruments so we can study the harmonics of the sky." And a way was to
open: they were to make their own telescopes--what larks! Brother and
sister set to work studying the laws of optics. In a secondhand store
they found a small Gregorian reflector which had an aperture of about
two inches.

This gave them a little peep into the heavens, but was really only a
tantalization.

They set to work making a telescope-tube out of pasteboard. It was about
eighteen feet long, and the "board" was made in the genuine pasteboard
way--by pasting sheet after sheet of paper together until the substance
was as thick and solid as a board.

So this brother and sister worked at all odd hours pasting sheet after
sheet of paper--old letters, old books--with occasional strips of cloth
to give extra strength. Lenses were bought in London, and at last our
precious musical pair, with astronomy for their fad, had the
satisfaction of getting a view of Saturn that showed the rings.

It need not be explained that astronomical observations must be made out
of doors. Further, the whole telescope must be out of doors so as to get
an even temperature. This is a fact that the excellent astronomers of
the Mikado of Japan did not know until very recently. It seems they
constructed a costly telescope and housed it in a costly
observatory-house, with an aperture barely large enough for the big
telescope to be pointed out at the heavens. Inside, the astronomer had a
comfortable fire, for the season was then Winter and the weather cold.
But the wise man could see nothing and the belief was getting abroad
that the machine was bewitched, or that their Yankee brothers had
lawsonized the buyers, when our own David P. Todd, of Amherst, happened
along and informed them that the heat-waves which arose from their warm
room caused a perturbation in the atmosphere which made star-gazing
impossible. At once they made their house over, with openings so as to
insure an even temperature, and Prince Fusiyama Noguchi wrote to
Professor Todd, making him a Knight of the Golden Dragon on special
order of the heaven-born Mikado.

The Herschels knew enough of the laws of heat and refraction to realize
they must have an even temperature, but they forgot that pasteboard was
porous.

One night they left their telescope out of doors, and a sudden shower
transformed the straight tube into the