“Very good,” I replied. “All science and all forms of knowledge are rooted in the imagination. To-morrow we shall begin with the photographs, and many most interesting things that I have not yet mentioned will then naturally present themselves before us.”
“Good night then,” said my companion, “and to-morrow I shall count upon the delights of a photographic journey in the moon.”
I
NEW MOON TO FIRST QUARTER
I
NEW MOON TO FIRST QUARTER
AT breakfast the next morning I asked my friend if she still had sufficient curiosity concerning the moon to induce her to undertake the contemplated journey amid lunar scenes.
“Yes, surely,” she replied. “My dreams last night were filled with wonderful spectacles; great cones of shadow flitted continually through the heavens, eclipsing, in turn, moon, sun, and stars; and I stared, as it seemed, for hours at strange faces veiled behind a maze of mathematical diagrams covering the moon. I am not sure that your discourses have made me scientifically much wiser, but I feel that my imagination is sufficiently aroused to enable me to enjoy the photographic excursion that you have proposed, and I am quite ready to start at once.”
“Excellent!” I said, producing my portfolio. “Here then are the photographs which I trust will enable us, in imagination, to spend an interesting month upon the moon. These photographs were made at the Yerkes observatory and they represent the moon, as you will perceive, in all of her principal phases, beginning with the narrow crescent of the New Moon, and ending with the similar, but reversed, sickle of the Old Moon.”