“Friends of the class of 1915, it is certainly ridiculous that two valedictorians should come from one family. In fact I guess it is a sort of joke that was played on us. Anyhow the real reason why I was chosen to say good-by was that I remembered a remark of my big brother. One evening last summer we were looking at a star which the Greeks called Phosphor in the morning and Hesperus in the evening, and I said that Venus was a poor name to teach the seniors, because they have all they can do to keep from falling in love, and that Venus is a planet, not a star. “Horatio answered that the dictionary lets us call any heavenly body of light a star. Then he said that if we were on Venus, the earth would look exactly like Venus, a steady point of white lightning. “I told this tale at class one day, and they elected me valedictorian right away, with instructions to tell you all that the class of 1915 knows about the earth. They thought that ten minutes would be enough. “So every evening since then I have been obliged to think about the earth as a star, and sometimes the other members of the class came up to our house and helped me think. All this spring we have been doing it, and the way we did it was to pick up the earth and throw it out into the sky. There it would hang, and we could make it look as small as Venus or as big as the moon. When it was about as big as the moon we loved it very much. “The first time all we could see was a great whirling thistledown. It must have been a cloudy evening on the earth, and there were lovely colors along the sunset line where the bright half met the dark half. “Next evening the thistledown had changed into a soap-bubble half dark and half bright, but all of it as pretty as a rainbow. Little flecks of cloud kept rising from the equator, moving towards the poles, and then returning. “Next evening the atmosphere had all disappeared, and we saw only the water, just a round whirling jewel, like a turquoise with white poles. “Next evening we saw the places where the rock showed through. We have learned to call them continents and islands. At first they looked like rough pearl, or like the red earth of the planet Mars, but we soon saw that they were covered with a soft green mist, thicker at the equator and thinner as it spread towards the poles. “Next evening we studied the green mist. Most of it is leaves, such as lettuce and sequoias, which are coaxed out of the crumbled rock by the sun, but it has veins of pink where leaves have turned into animals. The mist of life was as thin as the bloom on a blueberry, but it was wonderful.