“This leads us next to inquire, ‘What is the actual size of the moon?’ When we know the distance of any body from the eye it is not difficult to determine its size. The diameter of the moon is 2,163 miles. The face of the full moon contains 7,300,000 square miles. It is a little larger than the continent of South America. For a reason that we will speak of presently, the moon always keeps the same side toward us no matter in what part of its orbit it may be. Consequently we always see the same features of her surface and, except through inference, we do not know what exists on the other side of the lunar globe. Of the 7,300,000 square miles of surface which the moon presents to us, about 2,900,000 are occupied by those dark gray patches which you see so plainly spotting her face, and which were once supposed to be seas. The remaining 4,400,000 square miles consist of a very rough, broken country, ridged with gigantic mountains and containing hundreds of enormous craters, and mountain-ringed valleys, which are so vast that one hesitates to call them, what many of them seem evidently to be, extinct volcanoes. A single explosion of a volcano of the dimensions of some of these lunar monsters would shake the whole earth to its center!” “Please stop a moment,” my friend laughingly interrupted. “So many merciless facts, chasing one at the heels of another, are as bad as the books on your science that I have tried to read. Give my imagination time to overtake you.” “Very well,” I said, “then relieve your attention a little while by regarding the face of the moon. Do you perceive the portrait of the Moon Maiden there?” “I believe I do, although I never noticed it before. It is in profile, is it not?” “Yes, and it occupies all the central portion of the western half of the disk. Take the opera glass and you will see it more clearly.” “Really, I find her quite charming,” said my companion, after gazing for a minute through the glass. “But what a coquette! Look at the magnificent jewel she wears at her throat, and the _parure_ of pearls that binds her hair!” “Yes,” I replied, “and no terrestrial coquette ever wore gems so unpurchasable as those with which the Moon Maiden has decked herself. That flaming jewel on her breast is a _volcano_, with a crater more than fifty miles across! Tycho, astronomers call it. Observe with the glass how broad rays shoot out from it in all directions. They are among the greatest mysteries of lunar scenery. And the string of brilliants in her hair consists of a _chain of mountains_ greater than the Alps—the lunar Apennines. They extend more than 450 miles, and have peaks 20,000 feet high, which gleam like polished facets.” “Truly,” said my companion, smiling, “these gigantesque facts of yours rather tend to dissipate the romantic impression that I had conceived of the Moon Maiden.”