What else ensues I am unable to say. A writer who believes that the new moon can rise in the east soon after sunset and the full moon at 10 o’clock; who thinks the second of these remarkable phenomena can occur twenty-four hours after the first, and itself be followed some fourteen hours later by an eclipse of the sun—such a man may be a gifted writer, but I am not a gifted reader. I wash my mind of him, and sentence him to the good opinion of his admirers. Another sinner on my list of authors ignorant in respect of the moon’s movements and phases is William Black. In the third chapter of his _Princess of Thule_ is the following sentence: “Was Sheila about to sing in this clear strange twilight while they sat there and watched the yellow moon come up behind the Southern hills?” The spectacle of the moon rising in the south is one which Heaven has denied to all except the characters in Black’s novels. It is not surprising that Sheila “was about to sing”: she must have felt something of the exultation which swells the bosom of that favored child of Destiny, the small boy who has crept in under the canvas when the menagerie people are painting the tiger. It may be borne in mind that Black’s south-rising moon came up during the twilight—that is to say, shortly after sunset. It would be, therefore, nearly “half-full” to the eye of the terrestrial observer; but referring to a later hour of the same evening Black says: “There into the beautiful dome rose the golden _crescent_ of the moon, warm in color as though it still retained the last rays of the sunset.” Concerning the last clause of this astonishing sentence it may be asked from what source Black supposed the moon’s light to be derived, or if he regarded her as self-luminous. The truth probably is that he had no definite ideas about the matter at all. He was in the same comfortable mental state as the worthy countryman who, being asked what he thought of total depravity, promptly replied that if it was in the Bible he was in favor of it. In dismissing Black I can not forbear to add that even if the moon could rise in the south; even if rising in the south it should continue rising into the dome when it should be setting; even if rising in the south soon after sunset a half-moon, as it would necessarily be, and continuing to rise into the dome when it should be setting, it could dwindle to a crescent, it could not be of a warm color. The crescent moon is as cold in color as a new dime—almost as cold as a quarter-dollar. In a bench-show of astronomers I doubt if Black would have been awarded a blue ribbon. I have been reading a story by Mr. Edgar Saltus: “A Maid of Athens”—a story which, like a forgotten candle, burns on well enough to the end and then dies in its own grease. But that is not the point; I find this passage: “Beneath descending night, the sky was gold-barred and green. In the east the moon glittered like a sickle of tin.”