And in this undignified manner did Joshua Cole begin his tour as a lecturing astronomer.
All day long he remained hidden in the willow-screened bed of a river that paralleled the railroad tracks, hungry and afraid to venture forth. He slept a little, making up for his oft-interrupted slumbers of the night. His bones ached like the bones of an old man, for the boxcar floor had been even harder than the straw mattresses of the House of Refuge. But when darkness came he sallied out and sought the main street of the village, where men lazed in the moonlight under wooden awnings, and girls and women, garbed in flimsy lawns, paraded back and forth, with arms encircling waists, through a flower-perfumed night in early summer.
At the principal corner the hungry waif set up his tripod, adjusted his telescope, and trained it on the rising moon. Then his courage, cowed by hunger, bade fair to desert him, and to make him forget the speech that he had been rehearsing all day. But he girded up his loins, and in a squeaky, stage-frightened voice addressed a number of loafers who had been viewing his operations in silent wonder.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he quavered, “to-night the mu—moon is in the last quarter, and the black, pointed shadows of the towering peaks of the lunar Alps are—are very clear. To-night you can see plainly the longest mountain range on the moon. This great range is four hundred and sixty miles in length, and is called the Apennines. Three thousand sharp peaks in this range rise abruptly from the Mare Imbrum to a height of from twelve thousand to twenty thousand feet. These are plainly visible to-night through this telescope that I have here. You may look at them for ten cents apiece, and each observer will be allowed three minutes at the telescope. While you look I shall explain the various moon objects that are of interest to you. Now, who—who’ll be the first?”
He looked, as he stood there timidly regarding them, like some young disciple of the eternal stars, sent on earth to scatter the fogs of prejudice and superstition. The pale light of the moon fell softly on his lean, ascetic features and threw them in sharp relief. His coal-black hair accentuated the steel-cut lines in the picture of his face. Even in the half-light those earnest, tolerant, gray-blue eyes seemed to plead; and at last a man, whispering to his neighbor, screwed himself sidewise and reached a hand into his trousers pocket.
“Le’s see what the kid’s got up his sleeve,” he suggested, and walked toward Joshua with his dime.
Being instructed, he placed his eye to the eye-piece. There followed a moment or two of silence, and then Joshua’s first patron breathed a deep sigh and fervently muttered:
“Gysh A’mighty!”
Wonders of which he had never dreamed suddenly were revealed to him. His phlegmatic soul had been whisked away from his game of horseshoes of the afternoon, his heavy supper of fried pork and gravy and baking-powder biscuits, and was borne up, up, up, as light as the perfume of the flowering night, to a mystic region that his imagination never could have pictured.
“Gysh!” he breathed again.