the earth if he never stopped
to eat or drink on the way?'

And the prisoner answered promptly: 'If he rose with the sun and kept
pace with it all day, and never stopped for a moment to eat or drink, he
would take just twenty-four hours, Your Royal Highness.' For in those
days it was supposed that the sun went round the earth.

Everyone is so remarkably clever nowadays that I am sure there will be
someone clever enough to object that, if what I have said is true, there
would be a great draught, for the air would be rushing past us. But, as
a matter of fact, the air goes with us too. If you are inside a railway
carriage with the windows shut you do not feel the rush of air, because
the air in the carriage travels with you; and it is the same thing on
the earth. The air which surrounds the earth clings to it and goes round
with it, so there is no continuous breeze from this cause.

But the spinning round on its own axis is not the earth's only movement,
for all the time it is also moving on round the sun, and once in a whole
year it completes its journey and comes back to the place from whence it
started. Thus the turning round like a top or rotating on its axis makes
the day and night, and the going in a great ring or revolving round the
sun makes the years.

Our time is divided into other sections besides days and years. We have,
for instance, weeks and months. The weeks have nothing to do with the
earth's movements; they are only made by man to break up the months;
but the months are really decided by something over which we have no
control. They are due to the moon, and, as I have said already, the moon
must have a chapter to herself, so we won't say any more about the
months here.

If any friend of ours goes to India or New Zealand or America, we look
upon him as a great traveller; yet every baby who has lived one year on
the earth has travelled millions of miles without the slightest effort.
Every day of our lives we are all flung through space without knowing it
or thinking of it. It is as if we were all shut up in a comfortable
travelling car, and were provided with so many books and pictures and
companions that we never cared to look out of the windows, so that hour
by hour as we were carried along over miles of space we never gave them
a thought. Even the most wonderful car ever made by man rumbles and
creaks and shakes, so that we cannot help knowing it is moving; but this
beautiful travelling carriage of