at stellar objects
whose wonders were known, recounted, and classified, long before his own
personality had been heard of. With a child's simple delight he allowed
his instrument to rove, evening after evening, from the gorgeous glitter
of Canopus to the hazy clouds of Magellan. Before he had well finished
this optical prelude there floated over to him from the other side of the
Equator the postscript to the epistle of his lost Viviette. It came in
the vehicle of a common newspaper, under the head of 'Births:'--

'April 10th, 18--, at the Palace, Melchester, the wife of the Bishop of
Melchester, of a son.'

XLI

Three years passed away, and Swithin still remained at the Cape, quietly
pursuing the work that had brought him there. His memoranda of
observations had accumulated to a wheelbarrow load, and he was beginning
to shape them into a treatise which should possess some scientific
utility.

He had gauged the southern skies with greater results than even he
himself had anticipated. Those unfamiliar constellations which, to the
casual beholder, are at most a new arrangement of ordinary points of
light, were to this professed astronomer, as to his brethren, a far
greater matter.

It was below the surface that his material lay. There, in regions
revealed only to the instrumental observer, were suns of hybrid kind--fire-
fogs, floating nuclei, globes that flew in groups like swarms of bees,
and other extraordinary sights--which, when decomposed by Swithin's
equatorial, turned out to be the beginning of a new series of phenomena
instead of the end of an old one.

There were gloomy deserts in those southern skies such as the north shows
scarcely an example of; sites set apart for the position of suns which
for some unfathomable reason were left uncreated, their places remaining
ever since conspicuous by their emptiness.

The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old
horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by
bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless
vacancy touched him now on the other side. Infinite deeps in the north
stellar region had a homely familiarity about them, when compared with
infinite deeps in the region of the south pole. This was an even more
unknown tract of the unknown. Space here, being less the historic haunt
of human thought than overhead at home, seemed to be pervaded with a more
lonely loneliness.