know much about crickets of this kind, except that their
habits are similar to those of the large ones, and that they are very
numerous.

HERBERT AND ELLA LYMAN.

[Illustration]

FIFTH LESSON IN ASTRONOMY.

"A little boy was dreaming,
Upon his nurse's lap,
That the pins fell out of all the stars,
And the stars fell into his cap.

So, when his dream was over,
What should that little boy do?
Why, he went and looked inside his cap--
And found it wasn't true."

IF that little boy had been wide awake, and out of doors, with his cap
on his head, instead of dreaming in his nurse's lap, don't you think he
might really have seen a star fall out of the sky? Haven't you all seen
one many a time?

But you would never dream that those blazing suns, the stars, are pinned
into the sky, and that they might tumble into your cap if the pins fell
out. You know better than that; but do you know what does happen when a
star falls?

We say, "A star falls," because what we see falling looks to us like a
star; but it really is no more like a star than a lump of coal. If we
should see a piece of blazing coal falling through the air, we might be
foolish enough to think that, too, was a star. And what we call a
shooting star is, perhaps, more like a lump of coal on fire than like
any thing else you know of.

Sometimes these shooting stars fall to the ground, and are picked up and
found to be rocks. How do you suppose they take fire? It is by striking
against the air which is around our earth. They come from nobody knows
where, and are no more on fire than any rock is, until they fall into
our air; and that sets them blazing, just as a match lights when you rub
it against something.

These meteors, as they are called, do not often fall to the ground; only
the very large ones last until they reach the earth; most of them burn
up on their way down. I think that is lucky, because they might at any
time fall into some little boy's cap and spoil it, and might even fall
on his head, if they were in the habit of falling anywhere.

That little boy who thought the stars were only pinned in their places
must have felt very uneasy. I don't wonder that he dreamed about them.

Once in a great while, a shower of meteors rains down upon the earth;
and sometimes many of them can be seen falling from the sky, and b