ock gun rolled through the night
air, its echoes reverberating fainter and fainter until lost in the
distance to seaward.

"By Jove!" exclaimed the Captain, throwing his cards on the table and
rising from his seat,--"It's time for me to say good-night, or I shan't
get any beauty sleep!"

"It's not so very late," said Mrs Gilmour, rising and going towards the
open window looking over the Common. "What a lovely night it is!"

"Aye," replied the old sailor, following her, "the sky is bright and
clear enough, certainly."

"Yes, what myriads of stars are out! I can see the `milky way' quite
plain, can't you, children?"

"Where, auntie?" asked Nellie behind her, while Bob stepped out on to
the balcony the better to see. "I don't see it."

Mrs Gilmour showed them the forked pathway leading up from the south
and east to the zenith, looking as if powdered with the dust of stars
which `Charles's wain,' as country people term the constellation, had
crushed in its lumbering progress through the heavens.

Away beyond this golden `wake' of starlets the more majestic planets
shone in stately grandeur; while the evening star twinkled in the
immensity of space, still further away to the westwards.

"But the more you look at them, the further away they appear to go," put
in Nellie. "Though, strangely enough, they don't seem to get any
smaller."

"Aye, aye," acquiesced the Captain. "It _is_ awful to think of the
millions of miles they are separated from our globe, and that yet their
light reaches us! Why, it is wonderful for us to reflect on this!"

"Hark! I hear a church bell ringing," cried Bob suddenly at this point.
"It sounds as if it came from the sea out yonder."

"So it does, my boy," answered the Captain; "but not from any church.
It is the bell on the Spit buoy that you hear ringing away to the
southward. It is a bad sign for to-morrow, denoting as it does a change
of wind to a rainy quarter?"

"Oh dear!" exclaimed Bob, in such lugubrious tones that even Nellie
laughed, although sharing his feelings about the prospect of a wet day,
with the more than probable contingency of their being confined to the
house. "What shall we do?"

"Cheer up, my lad, it may not be so bad after all," cried the Captain
heartily. "But, really, I must be going now; for, it is close on ten
o'clock and I shall lose all my beauty sleep, as I said before. Where
is young Dick?"

"Down in the kitchen with Sarah," replied Mrs Gilm