"What a lovely night it is!" "Aye," replied the old sailor, following her, "the sky is bright and clear enough, certainly." "Yes, what myriads of stars are out! I can see the `milky way' quite plain, can't you, children ?" "Where, auntie ?" asked Nellie behind her, while Bob stepped out on to the balcony the better to see.

"I don't see it." Mrs Gilmour showed them the forked pathway leading up from the south and east to the zenith, looking as if powdered with the dust of stars which `Charles's wain,' as country people term the constellation, had crushed in its lumbering progress through the heavens.
Away beyond this golden `wake' of starlets the more majestic planets shone in stately grandeur; while the evening star twinkled in the immensity of space, still further away to the westwards.
"But the more you look at them, the further away they appear to go," put in Nellie.

"Though, strangely enough, they don't seem to get any smaller." "Aye, aye," acquiesced the Captain.

"It _is_ awful to think of the millions of miles they are separated from our globe, and that yet their light reaches us! Why, it is wonderful for us to reflect on this!" "Hark! I hear a church bell ringing," cried Bob suddenly at this point.
"It sounds as if it came from the sea out yonder." "So it does, my boy," answered the Captain; "but not from any church.
It is the bell on the Spit buoy that you hear ringing away to the southward.

It is a bad sign for to-morrow, denoting as it does a change of wind to a rainy quarter ?" "Oh dear!" exclaimed Bob, in such lugubrious tones that even Nellie laughed, although sharing his feelings about the prospect of a wet day, with the more than probable contingency of their being confined to the house.