But before I fell asleep, while Aunt Gretel was still sitting on the bedside with her knitting, I heard her say to herself-- "Not so very strange--not so strange after all, although Dr. Luther did make it all clear as sunshine more than a hundred years ago. It is that bit of ice in the heart, that bit of ice that is always freezing afresh in the heart." But Aunt Dorothy, on a night's consideration, thought the affair of the apple-tree too important to be passed over, as most of our childish quarrels were, without troubling my father about them. Accordingly the next morning we were summoned into my father's private room, where he received his rents as a landlord, and sentenced offenders as a magistrate, and kept his law-books, and many other great hereditary folios on divinity, philosophy, and things in general. A very solemn proceeding for me that morning, my conscience oppressed with a sense of having done some wrong intentionally, and I knew not how much more without intending it. Gradually, Roger and I standing on the other side of the table, with the law-books and the mathematical instruments my father was so fond of between us, he drew from us what had been the subject of our conversation. Then, to my surprise, as we stood awaiting our sentence, he called me gently to him, and, seating me on his knee, pointed out a paper spread on a huge folio volume, which lay open before him. It was a diagram of the sun and the planets, with the four moons of Jupiter, the earth and the moon, complicated by circles and lines mysteriously intersecting each other. "Olive," said he, "be so good as to explain that to me. It is made by a gentleman who learned about it from the great astronomer Galileo, and is meant to explain how the earth and the sun are kept in their places." I looked at the complication of figures and lines and magical-looking signs, and then in his face to see what he could mean. "You do not understand it?" he said, as if he were surprised. "Father," said I, "a little child like me!" "And yet this is only a drawing of a little corner of the world, Olive--the sun and the earth and a few of the planets in the nook of the world in which we live. The whole universe is a good deal harder to understand than this." "Father," said I, ashamed and blushing, "indeed I never thought I could understand these things--at least not yet; I only thought you might, or some wise people somewhere." "Olive," said he, in a low voice, tenderly and reverently, stroking my head while he spoke, "before the great mysteries you and Roger have fallen on, I can only wonder, and wait, and say like you, '_Father, a little child like me!_' And I do not think the great Galileo himself could do much more." But to Roger he said, rising and laying his hand on his shoulder--