“But you do sit up too much o’ nights, Master Tom,” said Mrs Fidler plaintively. “I wouldn’t care if you’d invent a slope up in the top of the mill; but you won’t.”
“I often get a nap on the couch down below,” said Tom, laughing. “Look here, Mrs Fidler, come up again some evening, and you shall see how grand it all is.”
“No, my dear, no,” said the housekeeper, shaking her head. “I don’t understand it all. It scares me when you show me the moon galloping away through the skies, and the stars all spinning round in that dizzy way. It makes me giddy too; and last time I couldn’t sleep for thinking about the world going at a thousand miles an hour, for it can’t be safe. Then, too, I’m sure I should catch a cold in my head with that great shutter open. I was never meant for a star-gazer. Let me be as I am.”
And time went on, with Tom plunging more and more deeply into the grand science, and rapidly becoming his uncle’s right-hand man, helping him with the papers he sent up to the learned societies, till in the course of a couple of years people began to talk of the discoveries made with the big telescope at Heatherleigh.
Then came a morning about two years and a half after the terrible storm. Tom, who had not retired till three o’clock, for it had been a gloriously clear night, and he and his uncle had been busy for many hours over Saturn’s satellites, which had been observed with unusual clearness, was sleeping soundly, when he was awakened by the sharp rattling of tiny pebbles against his window.
“Hulloo! what is it, David?” he cried, as he threw open his window.
“I told you so, sir; I told you so,” cried the gardener. “I allus said how it would be.”
“Some one been after the apples again?”
“Apples! no, sir; ten times worse than that. Pete’s took.”
“What?”