Dr. Sneyd rose briskly, observing that it would indeed be a pity to lose such an evening. Temmy grasped his grandmamma’s hand, hoping that she was going too. He scarcely knew why, but he felt the observatory to be a very awful place, particularly at night, when only a faint bluish light came in through the crevices of the shifting boards; or a stray beam, mysteriously bright, fell from the end of the slanting telescope, and visibly moved on the floor. Grandpapa was rather apt to forget Temmy when he once got into the observatory, and to leave him shivering in a dark corner, wondering why every body spoke low in this place, and afraid to ask whether the stars really made any music which mortal ears might listen for. When grandpapa did remember the boy, he was not aware that he was uneasy and out of breath, but would call him here and send him there, just as he did in the study in broad daylight. It had been very different with grandmamma, the only time she had mounted hither with him. She had held his hand all the while, and found out that, tall as he was grown, he could see better by sitting on her knee; and she had clasped him round the waist, as if she had found out that he trembled. Perhaps she had heard his teeth chatter, though grandpapa did not. Temmy hoped they would not chatter to-night, as he did not wish that uncle Arthur should hear them; but Mrs. Sneyd was not to be at hand. She declared that she should be less tired with walking to the lodge than with mounting to the observatory. She would go and spend an hour with her daughter, and have some talk with Ephraim by the way. There needed no excuse for Temmy’s being out of breath, after mounting all the stairs in the house, and the ladder of the observatory to boot; and the planet which he was to see being still low in the sky was reason enough for uncle Arthur to hold him up to the end of the telescope. He did not recover his breath, however, as the moments passed on. This was a larger instrument than he had ever looked through before, and his present impressions were quite different from any former experience. The palpable roundness of the orb, the unfathomable black depth in which it moved solitary, the silence,—all were as if new to him. “You see it?” asked Arthur. “O, yes.” Another long silence, during which the boy breathed yet more heavily. “You see it still?” “No, uncle Arthur.” “My dear boy, why did you not tell me? We must overtake it. There! there it is once more! You must not let it travel out of sight again.”