long fringe it's got. Oh, my! don't go
to cryin'! Here comes Orville."

She stepped aside quickly. When her husband entered his eyes fell
instantly on his mother, weeping childishly over the new shawl. She
was in the old splint rocking-chair with the high back. "_Mother!_" he
cried; then he gave a frightened, tortured glance at his wife. Emarine
smiled at him, but it was through tears.

"Emarine ast me, Orville--she ast me to dinner o' herself! An' she
give me this shawl. I'm--cryin'--fer--joy--"

"I ast her to dinner," said Emarine, "but she ain't ever goin' back
again. She's goin' to _stay_. I expect we've both had enough of a
lesson to do us."

Orville did not speak. He fell on his knees and laid his head, like a
boy, in his mother's lap, and reached one strong but trembling arm up
to his wife's waist, drawing her down to him.

Mrs. Endey got up and went to rattling things around on the table
vigorously. "Well, I never see sech a pack o' loonatics!" she
exclaimed. "Go an' burn all your Christmas dinner up, if I don't look
after it! Turncoats! I expect they'll both be fallin' over theirselves
to knuckle down to each other from now on! I never see!"

But there was something in her eyes, too, that made them beautiful.

THE SUN'S HEAT.

BY SIR ROBERT BALL,

Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at Cambridge, England;
formerly Royal Astronomer of Ireland.

There is a story told of a well-intentioned missionary who tried to
induce a Persian fire-worshipper to abandon the creed of his
ancestors. "Is it not," urged the Christian minister, "a sad and
deplorable superstition for an intelligent person like you to worship
an inanimate object like the sun?" "My friend," said the old Persian,
"you come from England; now tell me, have you ever seen the sun?" The
retort was a just one; for the fact is, that those of us whose lot
requires them to live beneath the clouds and in the gloom which so
frequently brood over our Northern latitudes, have but little
conception of the surpassing glory of the great orb of day as it
appears to those who know it in the clear Eastern skies. The Persian
recognizes in the sun not only the great source of light and of
warmth, but even of life itself. Indeed, the advances of modern
science ever tend to bring before us with more and more significance
the surpassing glory with which Milton tells us the sun is crowned. I
shall endeavor to give in this article a brief sketch o