All which did not embarrass Philip so much as the interminable hours he spent behind the shut windows in the stale air--while bluebells lilted afar off and birds spoke their foreign exquisite languages. And now above all a widening had thrust his horizon far away and far away from the smoky limits of Doomington, far from the mythic circuit of green waves wherein England lay, far from the last hills of the world, out to the tingling spaces and the royal stars. For Segal, who had brought the dissolution of atheism with him, had brought also astronomy: with a singing for the quiet sun and a meaning for the hollows of sky. It was, of course, a long time now that for both Philip and Harry the flat layer of earth had dropped away, coiling round themselves to produce the globe they had seen in effigy, so far back as the days of Miss Green. But Segal introduced, as preliminaries, Sir Robert Ball and Proctor and Camille Flammarion, and a knowledge of constellations, the nature of nebulæ, star dust and the Milky Way, which united the three boys with a bond of fervent interest. For Segal it meant illimitable fresh spaces for the plummet of logic; and because Space was infinite, no room was left for God, who, if He existed at all, could thus only be attenuated into nothingness. Harry dreamed of an undiscoverable planet where equity among its mortals prevailed; for in the infinite types of star which space permitted through infinite time, it was evident that one such star had been or was or might be developed; it was to this ideal star that he hitched the lumbering wagon of earth. To Philip, the Milky Way was a divine bluebell bank dancing by the borders of a celestial river. The stars fed him with innumerable new images, giving to his conception of poetry a depth and height. And here once more, as if to consummate the significance Shelley had involved through each succeeding phase of Philip's adolescence, just as he had been found to crystallize a world in which complete escape from Doomington mud and brick might be realized; to hold the stormy banner of Socialism; to smite down the hydra-heads of religion; so now Shelley was seen to be a poet to whom the fields of stars were more naturally a place for wandering and singing than deathly fields of sorrel and marguerite; he was the Starry Poet. "I say, you chaps!" Harry said excitedly one day, "there's a telescope in the Curiosity Shop opposite the gaol! What about it?" "The inference being," suggested Segal, "that as soon as we've pinched the telescope the gaol's waiting on the other side of the road?" "No, old Cartwright's too watchful and the gaol too uncomfortable. Didn't you say so yourself when you came out after your last six months' hard? What about clubbing together and buying it?" "I've got fourpence!" said Philip. "I've not got that!" said Segal. "But let's find out about it. It's just the thing we want. Ye Gods, we might find a new comet! Beware, Halley!"