ought; but is
excluded by age, temperament, and situation from being much more than an
astonished spectator of its strangeness.

* * * * *

The Royal Observatory was about a mile out of the town, and hither he
repaired as soon as he had established himself in lodgings. He had
decided, on his first visit to the Cape, that it would be highly
advantageous to him if he could supplement the occasional use of the
large instruments here by the use at his own house of his own equatorial,
and had accordingly given directions that it might be sent over from
England. The precious possession now arrived; and although the sight of
it--of the brasses on which her hand had often rested, of the eyepiece
through which her dark eyes had beamed--engendered some decidedly bitter
regrets in him for a time, he could not long afford to give to the past
the days that were meant for the future.

Unable to get a room convenient for a private observatory he resolved at
last to fix the instrument on a solid pillar in the garden; and several
days were spent in accommodating it to its new position. In this
latitude there was no necessity for economizing clear nights as he had
been obliged to do on the old tower at Welland. There it had happened
more than once, that after waiting idle through days and nights of cloudy
weather, Viviette would fix her time for meeting him at an hour when at
last he had an opportunity of seeing the sky; so that in giving to her
the golden moments of cloudlessness he was losing his chance with the
orbs above.

Those features which usually attract the eye of the visitor to a new
latitude are the novel forms of human and vegetable life, and other such
sublunary things. But the young man glanced slightingly at these; the
changes overhead had all his attention. The old subject was imprinted
there, but in a new type. Here was a heaven, fixed and ancient as the
northern; yet it had never appeared above the Welland hills since they
were heaved up from beneath. Here was an unalterable circumpolar region;
but the polar patterns stereotyped in history and legend--without which
it had almost seemed that a polar sky could not exist--had never been
seen therein.

St. Cleeve, as was natural, began by cursory surveys, which were not
likely to be of much utility to the world or to himself. He wasted
several weeks--indeed above two months--in a comparatively idle survey of
southern novelties; in the mere luxury of looking