“Mrs. Clough is quite right. It’s ‘Up boys, and at it!’ we want to be; so, my dear fellow, don’t let any graceful scruples on your part hinder work.” “Then, Henderson, as the most rabid of us all, you must begin.” “I do not know that what I have to say should come first in order; but to save time I’ll begin. What I complain of is the crass ignorance of us--of myself, I mean. You know what a magnificent spectacle the heavens have offered these last few frosty nights. Well, one of our youngsters has, I think, some turn for astronomy. ‘Look, father, what a great star! It’s big enough to make the night light without the moon. It isn’t always there; what’s its name, and where does it go?’ The boy was in the receptive ‘How I wonder what you are’ mood; anything and everything I could have told him would have been his--a possession for life. “‘That’s not a star, it’s a planet, Tom,’ with a little twaddle about how planets are like our earth, more or less, was all I had for his hungry wonder. As for how one planet differs from another in glory, his sifting questions got nothing out of me; what nothing has, can nothing give. Again, he has, all of his own wit, singled out groups of stars and, like Hugh Miller, wasn’t it?--pricked them into paper with a pin. ‘Have they names? What is this, and this?’ ‘Those three stars are the belt of Orion’--the sum of my acquaintance with the constellations, if you will believe it! He bombarded me with questions all to the point. I tried bits of book knowledge which he did not want. It was a ‘bowing’ acquaintance, if no more, with the glorious objects before him that the child coveted, and he cornered me till his mother interfered with, ‘That will do, Tom: don’t tease father with your questions.’ A trifling incident, perhaps, but do you know I didn’t sleep a wink that night, or rather, I did sleep, and dreamt, and woke for good. I dreamt the child was crying for hunger and I had not a crust to give him. You know how vivid some dreams are. The moral flashed on me. The child had been crying to me with the hunger of the mind. He had asked for bread and got a stone. A thing like that stirs you. From that moment I had a new conception of a parent’s vocation and of my unfitness for it. I determined that night to find some way to help ourselves and the thousands of parents in the same ignorant case.” “Well, but, Henderson, you don’t mean to say that every parent should be an astronomer? Why, how can a man with other work tackle the study of a lifetime?”