acquired was incommunicable at
Marston-Cocking, or nearly so, and yet he was never weary. It was for
some inexplicable reason the food and the medicine which his mind
needed. It kept him in health, it pacified him, and contented him with
his lot.

On the following evening Miriam and her husband sat at tea.

"You didn't quite understand Mr. Armstrong, Miriam?"

"No, not quite."

"Ah! it is not easy; it all lies in the axis not being perpendicular,
and in our not being in the middle. Now look here!"

He took a long string; tied one end to the curtain-rod over the window,
and brought the other down to the floor. He then took Miriam, placed
her underneath it in the middle with her face to the window.

"Now, that is the north, and the top of the string is the pole star.
Just imagine the string the axis of a great globe in which the stars
are fixed, and that it goes round from your right hand to your left."
But to Miriam, although she had so strong an imagination, it was
unimaginable. It was odd that she could create Verona and Romeo with
such intense reality, and yet that she could not perform such a simple
feat as that of portraying to herself the revolution of an inclined
sphere.

Mr. Farrow was not disappointed.

"It will be all right," he said, and the next morning he was busy in
the shed in the bottom of the garden. He came to his afternoon meal
with glee, and directly it was over, took his wife away to see what he
had been doing. The shed had two floors, with a trap-door in the
middle. To the topmost corner of the upper story he had fixed a pole
which descended obliquely through a hole in the floor. This was the
axis, and the floor was the horizon. He had also, by the help of some
stoutish wire and some of his withies, fairly improvised a few
meridians, so that when Miriam put her head through the trap-door, she
seemed to be in the centre of a half globe.

"Now, my dear, it will all be plain. I cannot make the thing turn, but
you can fancy a star fixed down there in the east at the end of that
withy, and if the withy were to go round, or if the star were to climb
up it, it would just go so," tracing its course with his finger, "and
set there. Now, those stars near the pole, you see, would never set,
and that is why we see them all night long."

It all came to her in an instant.

"Really, how clever you are!" she said.

"Do you think so?" and there was a trace of something serious,
something