During all these weeks there had been continual items in the news concerning the new star--issued by father's Washington staff, and by most of the observatories of the northern hemisphere. Father is a queer character; the Holland blood in us makes us phlegmatic, silent, and cautious--characteristics which apply more to father than to me. He is a true scientist, calmly judicial, unwilling to judge anything, or form any decisive opinion, without every possible fact before him. Thus it was that during those weeks, neither Hulda in Porto Rico, nor myself had an intimation from father of the startling things he was learning. As he said finally, of what use to worry us until he was sure? Like the public in general, I became aware of conditions gradually. A news item here and there--items growing more insistent as the weeks passed, but still all crowded aside to make room for the sensational murder trial. I recall some of the items. The new Star was approaching the general region of our solar system with extraordinary velocity. A star of the fortieth magnitude. Then they said it was the thirtieth. Soon it was visible to the naked eye. I remember reading one account, not long after the star's discovery, in which its spectrum was reported to be sunlight! Our own solar spectrum! Reflected sunlight! This was no distant, gigantic, incandescent star blazing with its own light. It was not large and far away, but small and close. As small as our own earth, and already it was within the limits of our solar system. A dark globe, like our earth, or the moon, or Venus and Mars--dark and solid, shining only by reflected sunlight! By mid-December, at a convention of astronomers held in London, the new world was named Xenephrene. Father went over in one of the mail planes and read his afterward famous paper, suggesting the name, and giving his calculation of the elements of the orbit of this new heavenly body. It was the most startling announcement which had yet been made, and for one newspaper edition it got the first page. And I was ordered to give nine minutes of broadcasting time to it. "Xenephrene" was a globe not quite, but very nearly as large as the earth. It had come whirling in like a comet from the star-filled regions of outer space; presumably like a comet to encircle our sun and then, with a hyperbolic orbit, to depart from us forever. It had come visually into our northern heavens, and crossed the earth's orbit on the opposite side of the sun from us. It encircled the sun--this was in December--made its turn between the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and now was supposedly departing. * * * * *