"You idiot!" he angrily exclaimed; "cannot you understand that the planets are traveling a thousand times faster than the fastest express, and that if they meet, either one or the other must be destroyed?
What would become of your darling Montmartre then ?" The captain had touched a tender chord.

For a moment Ben Zoof stood with clenched teeth and contracted muscles; then, in a voice of real concern, he inquired whether anything could be done to avert the calamity.
"Nothing whatever; so you may go about your own business," was the captain's brusque rejoinder.
All discomfited and bewildered, Ben Zoof retired without a word.
During the ensuing days the distance between the two planets continued to decrease, and it became more and more obvious that the earth, on her new orbit, was about to cross the orbit of Venus.

Throughout this time the earth had been making a perceptible approach towards Mercury, and that planet--which is rarely visible to the naked eye, and then only at what are termed the periods of its greatest eastern and western elongations--now appeared in all its splendor.

It amply justified the epithet of "sparkling" which the ancients were accustomed to confer upon it, and could scarcely fail to awaken a new interest.

The periodic recurrence of its phases; its reflection of the sun's rays, shedding upon it a light and a heat seven times greater than that received by the earth; its glacial and its torrid zones, which, on account of the great inclination of the axis, are scarcely separable; its equatorial bands; its mountains eleven miles high;--were all subjects of observation worthy of the most studious regard.
But no danger was to be apprehended from Mercury; with Venus only did collision appear imminent.