esent upon these distant universes!

Let us suppose that we inhabit a planet illuminated by two suns, one
blue, the other red.

It is morning. The sapphire sun climbs slowly up the Heavens, coloring
the atmosphere with a somber and almost melancholy hue. The blue disk
attains the zenith, and is beginning its descent toward the West, when
the East lights up with the flames of a scarlet sun, which in its turn
ascends the heights of the firmament. The West is plunged in the
penumbra of the rays of the blue sun, while the East is illuminated with
the purple and burning rays of the ruby orb.

The first sun is setting when the second noon shines for the inhabitants
of this strange world. But the red sun, too, accomplishes the law of its
destiny. Hardly has it disappeared in the conflagration of its last
rays, with which the West is flushed, when the blue orb reappears on the
opposite side, shedding a pale azure light upon the world it
illuminates, which knows no night. And thus these two suns fraternize in
the Heavens over the common task of renewing a thousand effects of
extra-terrestrial light for the globes that are subject to their
variations.

Scarlet, indigo, green, and golden suns; pearly and multi-colored Moons;
are these not fairy visions, dazzling to our poor sight, condemned while
here below to see and know but one white Sun?

As we have learned, there are not only double, but triple, and also
multiple stars. One of the finest ternary systems is that of [gamma] in
Andromeda, above mentioned. Its large star is orange, its second green,
its third blue, but the two last are in close juxtaposition, and a
powerful telescope is needed to separate them. A triple star more easy
to observe is [zeta] of Cancer, composed of three orbs of fifth
magnitude, at a distance of 1" and 5"; the first two revolve round their
common center of gravity in fifty-nine years, the third takes over three
hundred years. The preceding figure shows this system in a fairly
powerful objective (Fig. 18).

[Illustration: FIG. 18.--Triple star [zeta] in Cancer.]

In the Lyre, a little above the dazzling Vega, [epsilon] is of fourth
magnitude, which seems a little elongated to the unaided eye, and can
even be analyzed into two contiguous stars by very sharp sight. But on
examining this attractive pair with a small glass, it is further obvious
that each of these stars is double; so that they form a splendid
quadruple system of two couples (Fig.