The man knelt again and breathed upon the embers, so that presently they began to glow. “I could not rest, my father,” said the boy, “and I grew so afraid of the loneliness that I have come to be near you. I do not think it is raining now, but the wind is speaking bitterly. I wish the stars would shine. I am not so craven-hearted when the stars look at me with their bright eyes.” “May there not be one among all those millions,” said his father, “who knows that to be so, and shines out to comfort you? Let us look.” With eager hands the boy helped his father to unfasten and cast back the shutters. Through heavy masses of walls and chimney-stacks a fragment of the void was to be seen. Across it the broken clouds were scudding, and a single star was visible. It emerged faint but keen and clear. “It is Jupiter,” cried the boy in a voice of joy and excitement. “Hail, mighty prince of the heavens! Ave, ave, great lord of the air!” The patient white-haired figure at the boy’s side was peering also towards the star. In his eyes shone the entrancement of many thoughts. II When at last the morning brought its grey light the boy set out with his father into the streets of the great city. Amid the dun-coloured wilderness through which he passed, amid the labyrinth of dread thoroughfares in which noise, dirt, and confusion seemed to contend, he grasped his father’s hand in the fear of his heart. The rattle of horses and carts, the mud-flinging hoofs and the cries of the drivers, the vigour and rudeness of the street-persons by whom he was hustled, filled him with a dire consternation. Yet beyond all that he suffered in this way, which was no more than a little personal inconvenience after all, was the fear, permanent, overmastering and intense, that never would his father and he be able to retrace their steps to that tiny refuge which they had left so lately, which now seemed so far away that they could never hope to win their way back. How could they hope to retrace their steps among that ever-surging sea of streets and houses and faces and vehicles? Once as he was submerged in a whirlpool that was formed by the meeting of four main arteries of traffic, and was compelled to wait until a strangely clad street-person, who wore a helmet like Minerva, stopped, by the magic process of holding up his hand, the unending procession of carts and horses to enable his father and himself and a swarm of street-persons, who pressed upon his heels and trod upon his toes, to pass to that debatable land across the way, which looked so full already that it could not yield space for another living soul, he held his father’s hand convulsively and said in a voice of despair: “I feel sure, my father, we shall never win our way back to our little room.”