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to be leaned up against the wall. "Hah!" said Uncle Richard, "at the end of a week," as he went up to the top-floor of the mill with his nephew. "Is it only a week, uncle?" said Tom. "Why, it seems to me as if I had been here for a month." "So long and tedious, boy?" "Oh no, uncle," said Tom confusedly. "I meant I seem to have been here so long, and yet the time has gone like lightning." "Then you can't have been very miserable, my boy?" "Miserable!" cried Tom. That was all; and Uncle Richard turned the conversation by pointing to the roof. "There," he said, "that used to swing round easily enough with the weight of those huge sails, which looked so little upon the mill, but so big when they are down. It ought to move easily now, boy." Tom tried, and found that the whole of the wooden top glided round upon its pivot with the greatest ease. "Yes, that's all very well," said his uncle, "but it will have to be disconnected from the mill-post. I shall want that to bear the new glass." "That?" said Tom, gazing at the huge beam which went down through the floor right to the basement of the mill. "Yes, boy; that will make a grandly steady stand when wedged tight. To a great extent this place is as good as if it had been built on purpose for an observatory. I shall be glad though when we get rid of the workmen, and all the litter and rubbish are cleared away." That afternoon a couple of carpenters began work, devoting themselves at first to the wooden dome-like roof, which they were to furnish from top to bottom with a narrow shutter, so formed that it could be opened to turn right over on to the roof, leaving a long slip open to the sky. That night, after he had gone up to his bedroom, Tom threw open his window, to sit upon the ledge, reaching out so as to have a good look at the sky which spread above, one grand arch of darkest purple spangled with golden stars. To his right was the tower-like mill, and behind it almost the only constellation that he knew, to wit, Charles's Wain, with every star distinct, even to the little one, which he had been told represented the boy driving the horses of the old northern waggon. "How thick the stars are to-night," he thought, as he traced the light clusters of the Milky Way, noting how it divided in one place into two. Then he tried to make out the Little Bear and failed, wondered which was the Dog Star, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, and ended by g
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