You lie in a marvelous stillness. The stars become your men and women. You become a man of Chaldea, and the constellations revive. There steals into your heart, and oh, how you needed it, the sweet influence of the Pleiades. Spellbound, you watch a ballet, a story up above. There are men on elephants and men tending camels, long strings of camels, ropes of camels, gulf streams of camels wending their way out of the South of the Universe into the bleak North. There are jeweled queens and striding harlequins and hesitating dwarfs. There are thirteen-year-old brides, with streaming luminous hair, riding on high-stepping ponies, riding the ways of the dark sky, till bid for by the heroes who come striding along the great ways from Arcturus.
The civilized world has been removed like a table that has been cleared, a table cluttered with papers and dishes. Civilization has been swept to one side. You cannot see it now; it is far away—indeed, out of your ken entirely. You are reduced to a child—whatever your age. You are a petted child of the universe. You shall be all by yourself in the midst of the world, and the Divine picture book shall be put in your hands for you to open, to look at, to turn the marvelous page. So you lie there enthralled, with dilated, excited, bright-shining eyes; just you, so many feet by so many, and look up at infinite breadth and infinite depth. What is a cabinet thought about the stars, a
“Whoever looked upon them shining
Nor turned to earth without repining.”
compared with the rapturous poetic experience of having lived nights with them, reading them in the great open chamber of the Universe!
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE TRAMP AS COOK
Then did he study some half hour
But as the Comick saith his heart was in the kitchen.