e steady way
towards Tristan, with the wind from the northward and eastwards on her
beam, she ran along steadily on one tack, with hardly a lurch, covering
some two hundred miles a day as regularly as the log was hove and the
sun taken at noon.

All this time, no sight could now have been more glorious than the
heavens presented each night after sunset. The myriads upon myriads of
stars that then shone out with startling brilliancy was something
amazing; and the puzzle to Fritz was, how astronomers could name and
place all these "lesser lights"--following their movements from day to
day and year's end to year's end, without an error of calculation, so
that they could tell the precise spot in the firmament where to find
them at any hour they might wish!

"And yet," said Fritz, musingly, "these wise men are puzzled sometimes."

"Nary a doubt o' thet," responded the skipper, who, in spite of his
rough manner and somewhat uncultivated language, thought more deeply
than many would have given him credit for; "I guess, mister, all the
book-larnin' in the world won't give us an insight inter the workin's o'
providence!"

"No," said Fritz. "The study of the infinite makes all our puny efforts
at probing into the mysteries of nature and analysing the motives of
nature's God appear mean and contemptible, even to ourselves."

"Thet's a fact," assented the skipper. "Look thaar, now! Don't thet
sky-e, now, take the gildin' off yer bunkum phi-loserphy an' tall
talkin' 'bout this system an' thet--ain't thet sight above worth more'n
a bushel o' words, I reckon, hey?"

Fritz gazed upwards in the direction the other pointed, right over the
port quarter of the ship and where the starry expanse of the stellar
world stretched out in all its beauty.

Eastwards, near the constellation Scorpio, was the Southern Cross, which
had first attracted their attention, the figurative crucifix of the
heavens; while the "scorpion," itself, upreared its head aloft,
surmounted by a brilliant diadem of stars that twinkled and scintillated
in flashes of light, like a row of gems of the first water--the body of
the fabled animal being marked out in fine curves, in which fancy could
trace its general proportions, half-way down the heavens. In a more
southerly direction, still, the parallel stars of the twin heroes Castor
and Pollux could be seen, shining out with full lustre in a sky that was
beautifully, intensely blue, conveying a sense of depths