The nearest to us of all the stars is that known as _Alpha Centauri_. Its distance is computed at 25,000,000,000,000 miles, which in our notation reads twenty-five trillion miles. It takes light over four years to traverse this distance. It would take the "Empire State Express," never stopping night or day and going at the rate of a mile a minute, almost 50,000,000 years to travel from the earth to this star. The next of the fixed stars and the brightest in all the heavens is that which we call _Sirius_ or the Dog Star. It is double the distance of Alpha Centauri, that is, it is eight "light years" away. The distances of about seventy other stars have been ascertained ranging up to seventy or eighty "light years" away, but of the others visible to the naked eye they are too far distant to come within the range of trigonometrical calculation. They are out of reach of the mathematical eye in the depth of space. But we know for certain that the distance of none of these visible stars, without a measurable parallax, is less than four million times the distance of our sun from the earth. It would be useless to express this in figures as it would be altogether incomprehensible. What then can be said of the telescopic stars, not to speak at all of those beyond the power of instruments to determine. If a railroad could be constructed to the nearest star and the fare made one cent a mile, a single passage would cost $250,000,000,000, that is two hundred and fifty billion dollars, which would make a 94-foot cube of pure gold. All of the coined gold in the world amounts to but $4,000,000,000 (four billion dollars), equal to a gold cube of 24 feet. Therefore it would take sixty times the world's stock of gold to pay the fare of one passenger, at a cent a mile from the earth to Alpha Centauri. The light from numbers, probably countless numbers, of stars is so long in coming to us that they could be blotted out of existence and we would remain unconscious of the fact for years, for hundreds of years, for thousands of years, nay to infinity. Thus if _Sirius_ were to collide with some other space traveler and be knocked into smithereens as an Irishman would say, we would not know about it for eight years. In fact if all the stars were blotted out and only the sun left we should still behold their light in the heavens and be unconscious of the extinction of even some of the naked-eye stars for sixty or seventy years. It is vain to pursue farther the unthinkable vastness of the visible Universe; as for the invisible it is equally useless for even imagination to try to grapple with its never-ending immensity, to endeavor to penetrate its awful clouded mystery forever veiled from human view.