! Not the slightest use; out it must come, and a new one must
be put in."

At length the day came for the start. Farrow had made a trial by
himself the night before, and nothing could be better. Mr. Armstrong
came over, and after tea they all three went upstairs into the large
garret which had been used as a workshop. The great handle was taken
down and fitted into its place, Mr. Armstrong standing at one end and
Miriam and her husband at the other. Obedient to the impulse, every
planet at once answered; Mercury with haste, and Saturn with such
deliberation that scarcely any motion was perceptible. The Earth spun
its diurnal round, the Moon went forward in her monthly orbit. The
lighted ground-glass globe which did duty for the sun showed night and
day and the seasons. Miriam was transported, when suddenly there was a
jerk and a stop. Something was wrong, and Farrow, who was fortunately
turning with great caution, gave a cry such as a man might utter who
was suddenly struck a heavy blow. He recovered himself instantly, and
luckily at the very first glance saw what was the matter. The nicety
of his own handicraft was the cause of the disaster. A shaving not
much thicker than a piece of writing-paper had dropped between two
cogs. A gentle touch of a quarter of an inch backwards released it.

"Hooray!" he cried in his mad delight, and the mimic planets
recommenced their journeys as silently almost as their great archetypes
outside.

"Strange," he said with a smile, "that such a chip as that should upset
the whole solar system."

Miriam looked at him for a moment inquiringly, and then fell to
watching the orrery again. Slowly the moon waxed and waned. Slowly
the winter departed from our latitude on the little ball representing
our dwelling-place, and the summer came; and as she still watched,
slowly and almost unconsciously her arms crept round her husband's
waist.

"That is a fair representation," said Mr. Armstrong, "of all that is
directly connected with us, excepting, of course, as I have told you,
that we could not keep the distances." A little later on, although he
disapproved of "gaping," as he called it, he taught Miriam so much of
geometry as was sufficient to make her understand what he meant when he
told her that a fixed star yielded no parallax, and that the earth was
consequently the merest speck of dust in the universe. She found his
simple trigonometry very, very hard, but to her husban