There needed no excuse for Temmy’s being out of breath, after mounting all the stairs in the house, and the ladder of the observatory to boot; and the planet which he was to see being still low in the sky was reason enough for uncle Arthur to hold him up to the end of the telescope. He did not recover his breath, however, as the moments passed on. This was a larger instrument than he had ever looked through before, and his present impressions were quite different from any former experience. The palpable roundness of the orb, the unfathomable black depth in which it moved solitary, the silence,—all were as if new to him.
“You see it?” asked Arthur.
“O, yes.”
Another long silence, during which the boy breathed yet more heavily.
“You see it still?”
“No, uncle Arthur.”
“My dear boy, why did you not tell me? We must overtake it. There! there it is once more! You must not let it travel out of sight again.”
“How can I stop it?” thought Temmy, and he would fain have pressed his hands before his eyes, as the silent vision traversed the space more brightly and more rapidly, it seemed to him, every moment. Arthur showed him, however,—not how to stop the planet, but how to move the instrument so as not to lose sight of it: he then put a stool under him, and told him he could now manage for himself. Dr. Sneyd had something to show his son on the other side of the heavens.
If Temmy had had the spheres themselves to manage, he could scarcely have been in a greater trepidation. He assured himself repeatedly that friends were at hand, but his head throbbed so that he could scarcely hear their whispers, and the orb now seemed to be dancing as he had seen the reflection of the sun dance in a shaken basin of water. He would look at something else. He jerked the telescope, and flash went one light after another before his eyes, as if the stars themselves were going out with a blaze. This would never do. He must look at something earthly. After another jerk to each side, which did not serve his purpose, he pushed it up, and saw—something which might belong to any of the worlds in being,—for Temmy knew no more about it than that it was most horrible. An enormous black object swept across the area of vision, again and again, as quick as lightning. It would not leave off. Temmy uttered a shriek of terror, and half slipped, half tumbled from his stool.
“What has the boy found? What can be the matter?” asked grandpapa. Arthur presently laughed, and told Temmy he was very clever to have found what he should have thought it very difficult to discover from this place—Arthur’s own mill;—the new windmill on the mound, whose sails were now turning rapidly in the evening breeze. It was some comfort to learn that his panic was not much to be wondered at. Uncle Arthur knew what it was to take in too near a range with a large telescope. He had done so once, and had been startled with an apparition of two red cheeks and two staring blue eyes, apparently within half an inch of the end of his own nose.