TCHERS OF GREENWICH.

There is a morsel of Greenwich Park, which has, for now nearly two
centuries, been held sacred from intrusion. It is the portion inclosed
by the walls of the Observatory. Certainly a hundred thousand visitors
must ramble over the surrounding lawns, and look with curious eye upon
the towers and outer boundaries of that little citadel of science, for
one who finds admission to the interior of the building. Its brick
towers, with flanking turrets and picturesque roofs, perched on the side
of the gravelly hill, and sheltered round about by groups of fine old
trees, are as well known as Greenwich Hospital itself. But what work
goes on inside its carefully preserved boundary, and under those
movable, black-domed roofs, is a popular mystery. Many a holiday-maker's
wonder has been excited by the fall, at one o'clock, of the huge, black
ball, high up there, by the weather vane on the topmost point of the
eastern turret. He knows, or is told if he asks a loitering pensioner,
that the descent of the ball tells the time as truly as the sun; and
that all the ships in the river watch it to set their chronometers by,
before they sail; and, that, all the railway clocks, and all the railway
trains over the kingdom are arranged punctually by its indications. But
how the heavens are watched to secure this punctual definition of the
flight of time, and what other curious labors are going on inside the
Observatory, is a sealed book. The public have always been, of
necessity, excluded from the Observatory walls, for the place is devoted
to the prosecution of a science whose operations are inconsistent with
the bustle, the interruptions, the talk, and the anxieties of popular
curiosity and examination.

But when public information and instruction are the objects, the doors
are widely opened, and the press and its _attaches_ find a way into
this, as into many other sacred and forbidden spots. Only last week one
of "our own contributors" was seen in a carriage on the Greenwich
railway, poring over the paper in the last Edinburgh Review that
describes our national astronomical establishment, and was known
afterward to have climbed the Observatory hill, and to have rung and
gained admission at the little, black, mysterious gate in the
Observatory wall. Let us see what is told in his report of what he saw
within that sacred portal.

In the park on a fine day all seems life and gayety--once within the
Observatory boundary