There was nothing for me to do but follow. But, somehow, I could not help wishing that my friend had not been so rash; and, somehow, I foresaw that we might not be able to leave this strange edifice so easily as we had entered. But, once within, we forgot our misgivings in contemplation of the magnificent scene around us. I had been in luxurious galleries before; I had seen the most ornate salons of the Old World, and the most lavishly bedecked of mosques and cathedrals; but never had I viewed or imagined so utterly sublime a hall. Here was a new art of the interior decorator, an art that seemed wholly without parallel in human experience; I was scarcely conscious that I was indoors, but rather felt myself to be in the open, in the open at night, under the wide and glittering heavens, with the light of innumerable stars above me, and the dim cloudy arch of the Milky Way. How the artist had produced his effect was more than I could say, but somehow, in his limited space, he had given the impression of vastness and distance, of the mystery and infinite silence of the starlight; and as I stood there entranced, I could almost imagine that I was back again on earth, gazing out into the night-skies as I had gazed so often from the Vermont hills with Alma Huntley.... And yet, perfectly patterned as they were, these skies were not the skies I had known. As I stood there watching, I became aware that certain of the constellations were slightly, almost indistinguishably out of position, the stars not quite in their proper relations to one another--and why this was, I could not attempt to say. But more striking was another alteration that had been wrought deliberately and with subtle artistry: above the stars, and about the thin girdle of the Milky Way, were filmy formations of light, which--perhaps it was only my imagination--gradually resolved themselves into tenuous human figures. One, an exquisitely graceful woman, seemed to be playing upon some lyre-like instrument; another, a youth with head uplifted as though in enraptured contemplation, impressed me as the spirit of all human aspiration; and still others, no less consummately outlined, appeared to represent the hopes and loves and immortal yearnings of man.