THE NEW PLANET
(The astronomers at Harvard have observed “perturbations in the orbital movement of Neptune,” such as might be caused by the presence of a new planet in the vicinity.)
I believe in the new planet. I was eleven years old in 1846, when Leverrier and Adams and Mary Somerville discovered Neptune through the disturbance and discomfort it was causing Uranus. “Perturbations,” they call that kind of disturbance. I had been having those perturbations myself, for more than two months; in fact, all through watermelon time, for they used to keep dogs in some of the patches in those days. You notice that these recent perturbations are considered remarkable because they perturbate through three seconds of arc, but really that is nothing: often I used to perturbate through as much as half an hour if it was a dog that was attending to the perturbating. There isn’t any Neptune that can outperturbate a dog; and I know, because I am not speaking from hearsay. Why, if there was a planet two hundred and fifty thousand “light-years” the other side of Neptune’s orbit, Professor Pickering would discover it in a minute if it could perturbate equal to a dog. Give me a dog every time, when it comes to perturbating. You let a dog jump out at you all of a sudden in the dark of the moon, and you will see what a small thing three seconds of arc is: the shudder that goes through you then would open the seams of Noah’s Ark itself, from figurehead to rudder post, and you would drop that melon the same as if you had never had any but just a casual interest in it. I know about these things, because this is not tradition I am writing, but history.
Now then, notice this. About the end of August, 1846, a change came over me and I resolved to lead a better life, so I reformed; but it was just as well, anyway, because they had got to having guns and dogs both. Although I was reformed, the perturbations did not stop! Does that strike you? They did not stop, they went right on and on and on, for three weeks, clear up to the 23d of September; then Neptune was discovered and the whole mystery stood explained. It shows that I am so sensitively constructed that I perturbate when any other planet is disturbed. This has been going on all my life. It only happens in the watermelon season, but that has nothing to do with it, and has no significance: geologists and anthropologists and horticulturists all tell me it is only ancestral and hereditary, and that is what I think myself. Now then, I got to perturbating again, this summer--all summer through; all through watermelon time: and where, do you think? Up here on my farm in Connecticut. Is that significant? Unquestionably it is, for you couldn’t raise a watermelon on this farm with a derrick.
That perturbating was caused by the new planet. That Washington Observatory may throw as much doubt as it wants to, it cannot affect me, because I know there is a new planet. I know it because I don’t perturbate for nothing. There has got to be a dog or a planet, one or the other; and there isn’t any dog around here, so there’s got to be a planet. I hope it is going to be named after me; I should just love it if I can’t have a constellation.
MARJORIE FLEMING, THE WONDER
CHILD
Marjorie has been in her tiny grave a hundred years; and still the tears fall for her, and will fall. What an intensely human little creature she was! How vividly she lived her small life; how impulsive she was; how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious, how repentant, how wise, how unwise, how bursting with fun, how frank, how free, how honest, how innocently bad, how natively good, how charged with quaint philosophies, how winning, how precious, how adorable--and how perennially and indestructibly interesting! And all this exhibited, proved, and recorded before she reached the end of her ninth year and “fell on sleep.”
Geographically considered, the lassie was a Scot; but in fact she had no frontiers, she was the world’s child, she was the human race in little. It is one of the prides of my life that the first time I ever heard her name it came from the lips of Dr. John Brown--his very own self--Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh--Dr. John Brown of Rab and His Friends--Dr. John Brown of the beautiful face and the sweet spirit, whose friends loved him with a love that was worship--Dr. John Brown, who was Marjorie’s biographer, and who had clasped an aged hand that had caressed Marjorie’s fifty years before, thus linking me with that precious child by an unbroken chain of handshakes, for I had shaken hands with Dr. John. This was in Edinburgh thirty-six years ago. He gave my wife his little biography of Marjorie, and I have it yet.
Is Marjorie known in America? No--at least to only a few. When Mr. L. MacBean’s new and enlarged and charming biography[[17]] of her was published five years ago it was sent over here in sheets, the market not being large enough to justify recomposing and reprinting it on our side of the water. I find that there are even cultivated Scotchmen among us who have not heard of Marjorie Fleming.
She was born in Kirkcaldy in 1803, and she died when she was eight years and eleven months old. By the time she was five years old she was become a devourer of various kinds of literature--both heavy and light--and was also become a quaint and free-spoken and charming little thinker and philosopher whose views were a delightful jumble of first-hand cloth of gold and second-hand rags.