ne,
A little talk while shines the moon,
A little reference to papa,
A little planning with mamma.

VIII.

A little ceremony grave,
A little struggle to be brave,
A little cottage on a lawn,
A little kiss--my girl was gone!

* * * * *

MARS, THE PLANET OF WAR.

BY RICHARD A. PROCTOR.

Not long ago, the planet Jupiter came among the stars of our southern
evening skies. Those who noted down his track found that he first
advanced from west to east, then receded along a track near his
advancing one, then advanced again, still running on a track side by
side with his former advancing track, and so passed away from the
scene, toward the part of the sky where the sun's light prevents our
tracking him.

That was a useful and rather easy first lesson about the motions of
the bodies called planets.

We have now to consider a rather less simple case, but one a great
deal more interesting. Two planets intrude among our evening stars,
each following a looped track, but the tracks are unlike; the two
planets are unlike in appearance, and they are also very unlike in
reality.

I hope many of my young readers have already found out for themselves
that these intrusive bodies have been wandering among our fixed stars.
I purposely said nothing about the visitors last August, so that those
who try to learn the star-groups from my maps may have had a chance of
discovering the two planets for themselves. If they have done so, they
have in fact repeated a discovery which was made many, many years ago.
Ages before astronomy began to be a science, men found out that some
of the stars move about among the rest, and they also noticed the kind
of path traveled in the sky by each of those moving bodies. It was
long, indeed, before they found out the kind of path traveled _really_
by the planets. In fact, they supposed our earth to be fixed; and if
our earth were fixed, the paths of the planets about her as a center
would be twisted and tangled in the most perplexing way. So that folks
in those old times, seeing the planets making all manner of loops and
twistings round the sky, and supposing they made corresponding loops
and twistings in traveling round the earth, thought the planets were
living creatures, going round the earth to watch it and rule over it,
each according to his own fashion. So they worshiped the planets as
gods, counting seven of them, including the sun and m