and watering them
with liquid light."

"Liquid fiddlestick!" said George. He had been to school, so he knew
that these were only the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. And he
said so.

"But what is the Rory Bory what's-its-name?" asked Jane. "Who lights it,
and what's it there for?"

George had to own that he had not learned that.

"But I know," said he, "that it has something to do with the Great Bear,
and the Dipper, and the Plough, and Charles's Wain."

"And what are they?" asked Jane.

"Oh, they're the surnames of some of the star families. There goes a
jolly rocket," answered George, and Jane felt as if she almost
understood about the star families.

The fairy spears of light twinkled and gleamed: They were much prettier
than the big, blaring, blazing bonfire that was smoking and flaming and
spluttering in the next-door-but-one garden--prettier even than the
colored fires at the Crystal Palace.

"I wish we could see them nearer," Jane said. "I wonder if the star
families are nice families--the kind that Mother would like us to go to
tea with, if we were little stars?"

"They aren't that sort of families at all, Silly," said her brother,
kindly trying to explain. "I only said 'families' because a kid like you
wouldn't have understood if I'd said constel ... and, besides, I've
forgotten the end of the word. Anyway, the stars are all up in the sky,
so you can't go to tea with them."

"No," said Jane. "I said if we were little stars."

"But we aren't," said George.

"No," said Jane, with a sigh. "I know that. I'm not so stupid as you
think, George. But the Tory Bories are somewhere at the edge. Couldn't
we go and see them?"

"Considering you're eight, you haven't much sense." George kicked his
boots against the fencing to warm his toes. "It's half the world away."

"It looks very near," said Jane, hunching up her shoulders to keep her
neck warm.

"They're close to the North Pole," said George. "Look here--I don't care
a straw about the Aurora Borealis, but I shouldn't mind discovering the
North Pole: It's awfully difficult and dangerous, and then you come home
and write a book about it with a lot of pictures, and everybody says how
brave you are."

Jane got off the fence.

"Oh, George, _let's_," she said. "We shall never have such a chance
again--all alone by ourselves--and quite late, too."

"I'd go right enough if it wasn't for you," George answered gloomily,
"but you know they always say I