long as they lived they would never see such another sight. A star
shower of this kind is certainly well worth getting up to see, but
though uncommon it is not unique. There are many records of such showers
having occurred in times gone by, and when men put together and examined
the records they found that the showers came at regular intervals. For
instance, every year about the same time in November there is a star
shower, not comparable, it is true, with the brilliant one the clergyman
saw, but still noticeable, for more shooting stars are seen then than at
other times, and once in every thirty-three years there is a specially
fine one. It happened in fact to be one of these that the village people
were wakened up to see.

Not all at once, but gradually, the mystery of these shower displays was
solved. It was realized that the meteors need not necessarily come from
one fixed place in the sky because they seemed to us to do so, for that
was only an effect of perspective. If you were looking down a long,
perfectly straight avenue of tree-trunks, the avenue would seem to close
in, to get narrower and narrower at the far end until it became a point;
but it would not really do so, for you would know that the trees at the
far end were just the same distance from each other as those between
which you were standing. Now, two meteors starting from the same
direction at a distance from each other, and keeping parallel, would
seem to us to start from a point and to open out wider and wider as they
approached, but they would not really do so; it would only be, as in the
case of the avenue, an effect of perspective. If a great many meteors
did the same thing, they would appear to us all to start from one point,
whereas really they would be on parallel lines, only as they rushed to
meet us or we rushed to meet them this effect would be produced.
Therefore the first discovery was that these meteors were thousands and
thousands of little bodies travelling in lines parallel to each other,
like a swarm of little planets. To judge that their path was not a
straight line but a circle or ellipse was the next step, and this was
found to be the case. From taking exact measurements of their paths in
the sky an astronomer computed they were really travelling round the sun
in a lengthened orbit, an ellipse more like a comet's orbit than that of
a planet. But next came the puzzling question, Why did the earth
apparently hit them every year to so