n doing so he was questioning a teacher who drew
a magnificent salary for spreading just such statements. "And if they
pay her all that money, they're crazy! Don't y' know that if we was t'
come upside down, the chimnies'd fall off all the buildin's? and East
River'd _spill_?"

Cis countered with a demonstration. She filled Big Tom's lunch pail with
water and whirled it, losing not a drop.

But he went further, and proved her wrong--that is so far as the
upside-down of it was concerned. He did this by staying awake the whole
of the following night and noting that the city stayed right-side up
throughout the long hours. Cis, poor girl, had been pitifully
misinformed.

But the changing of the sky he believed. He believed it because at night
there was the kind of sky overhead that had stars in it; also,
sometimes, a moon. But by dawn, the starred sky was gone--been left
behind, or got slipped to one side; in its place was a plain,
unpatterned stretch of Heaven which, in due time, was once more
succeeded by a firmament adorned and a-twinkle.

When Cis returned home one evening and declared that the forewoman at
the factory had asserted that there were stars everywhere in the sky by
day as well as by night, and no plain spots at all anywhere; and,
further, that if anybody were at the bottom of a deep well he--or
she--could see stars in the sky in the daytime, Johnnie had fairly
hooted at the tale. And had finally won Cis over to his side.

Her last doubt fled when, having gone down into a dark corner of the
area the Sunday following, she found, as did he, that no stars were to
be seen anywhere. After that she believed in his theory of starless
sky-spots; starless, but not plain. For in addition to the sun, many
other things lent interest to that field of blue--clouds, rain, sleet,
snow, and fog, all in their time or season. Also, besides the birds, he
occasionally glimpsed whole sheets of newspapers as they ambitiously
voyaged above the house tops. And how he longed for them to blow against
his own window, so that he might read them through and through!

Sometimes he saw a flying machine. The first one that had floated across
his sky had very nearly been the death of him. Because, forgetting
danger in his rapturous excitement, he had leaned out dangerously, and
might have fallen if he had not suddenly thought of Grandpa, and thrown
himself backward into the kitchen to fetch the wheel chair. The little
old soldier had