two years before, describing my climb up the steep and slippery roof of Bukovala’s mill in search of a star, she said: “You have done much climbing during the last two years, and I know that in your climbing you have found several real stars from heaven. One of them is now in Berlin and no sweets in Idvor will keep you away from it.” She guessed right, undoubtedly because she observed with what joy I kept up, during that vacation, my reading of Helmholtz’s addresses. Many a night during that summer I spent in my mother’s vineyard sleeping on sheepskins under the open sky and looking at the stars at which I looked fifteen years before, when I helped the herdsman to guard the village oxen during the starlit summer nights. I remembered the puzzles which I tried to solve at that time concerning the nature of sound and of light, succeeding in the case of sound and failing in the case of light. I rejoiced at the feeling that I had finally succeeded in finding from Faraday and Maxwell through Helmholtz that sound and light resembled each other, one being a vibration of matter, and the other a vibration of electricity. The fact that I did not know what electricity is did not disturb me, because I did not know what matter is. Nobody knows the exact nature of these even to-day, except, as Faraday suggested, that they are manifestations of force. David’s nineteenth Psalm, which I recited so often fifteen years before during my training in herdsmanship, conveyed a different meaning, and so did Lyermontoff’s line which says that “star speaketh to star.” They certainly spoke to me during those glorious August nights, when, covered with sheepskins, I lay in my mother’s vineyard and amid the deep silence of slumbering earth I listened to their heavenly tales. The more I listened the more I became reconciled to the idea that the language of the stars reaches me in the same way that human language does, when it speeds on over the telephone wire, conveyed by vibratory electric and magnetic forces; except that in the transmission of the telephonic message the vibratory forces glide along the conducting wire, whereas the stars pour out their waves of vibratory electromagnetic forces in ever-expanding spheres so that they may carry the heavenly message to every other star and to everything that lives, and to everything that has a being. I could not help telling my mother of my new knowledge which persuaded me that light is a vibration of electricity, very much like the vibration of the melodious string described in the Serbian figure of speech, familiar to her, which says: My heart quivers like the melodious string under the guslar’s bow.