But the isolation of his journey is not always so forbidding. His coming back is no less girt with grandeur of a different though equally detached a kind. Even before the stars begin to dim in warning to him to return, a faint suffusion as of half-suspected light creeps into the border of the eastern sky. Against it, along the far pine-clad horizon, mesa after mesa in shaggy lines of sentineling earth, stands forth dark marshaled in the gloom, informed with prescience of what is soon to come. Imperceptibly the pallor grows, blanching the face of night and one by one extinguishing the stars. Slowly then it takes on color, tingeing ever so faintly to a flush that swells and deepens as the minutes pass. One had said the sky lay dreaming of the sun in pale imagery at first that gathers force and feeling till the dreamer turns thus rosy red in slumbering supposition of reality. Then the blush dies out. The crimson fades to pink, the pink to ashes. The stars have disappeared and yet it is not day. It is the supreme moment of the dawn, the hush with which the Earth awaits its full awakening. For now again the color gathers in the east, not with the impalpable suffusion it had before but nearer and more vivid. No longer reflectively remote, rays imminent of the sun strike the upper air, the most adventurously refrangible turning the underside of a few stray clouds into flame-hued bars of glowing metal. They burn thus in the silent east first red, then orange, and then gold, each spectral tint in prismatic revelation coming to join the next till in a sudden blinding burst of splendor the solar disk tops the horizon’s rim. Not less impressive is the journey when the afternoon watch has replaced the morning vigil by the drawing of the planet nearer to the sun. Lost in the brilliance of the dazzling sky, the planet lies hid from the senses’ search. The quest were hopeless did not the mind guide the telescope to its goal. To theory alone is it visible still, and so to its predicted place the observer sets his circles, and punctual to the prophecy the planet swings into the field of view. One must be dulled by long routine to such mastery of mind not to have the act itself clothe with a sense of charmed withdrawal the object of his quest. So much and more there are of traveler’s glimpses by the way, compensation that offsets the frequent discomfort, and even balking of his purpose by inopportune cloud. For the best of places is not perfect, and a storm will sometimes rob him of a region he wished to see. He must learn to wait upon his opportunities and then no less to wait for mankind’s acceptance of his results; for in common with most explorers he will encounter on his return that final penalty of penetration, the certainty at first of being disbelieved.